[sclug] Help! (with a big 'H')

[Alex Butcher]

On Fri, 25 Apr 2008, n.a.haughton at bigfoot.com wrote:

> Last night I took a deep breath and allowed my sweetly running Ubuntu 7.10
> installation to upgrade itself to 8.04.
>
> Big, big mistake. I now have a very broken system.
>
> Firstly, it has 'lost' a partition with all my data on it. I had a symlink
> called 'data' in my /home/me folder pointing to /media/hda10, where I had
> /dev/hda5 (reiser fs) mounted,
>
>
> ie /home/me/data -> /media/hda10 -> /dev/hda5
>
> and that was where all my data was stored, leaving just the usual config
> stuff in /home/me.
>
> The arrangement worked fine for 6.04, 6.10, 7.04, 7.10. Unfortunately now
> /dev/hda5 has vanished - that is, there are no hd? devices to be found in
> /dev.

I guess Ubuntu has moved to libata, and so all disc devices are now /dev/sd*
devices, even if they're EIDE/PATA.

> Not only that, I can't make head nor tail of the 'new' /etc/fstab. It
> looks totally alien to me (something to do with using UUIDs or something). I
> was quite familiar with the 'classic' fstab arrangement but this new UUID
> thing has thrown me.

Showing us what your new fstab looks like would help if you want guidance
here. Red Hat and Fedora use filesystem labels in their fstab by default. I
guess UUIDs are a bit more foolproof, if one connects multiple volumes with
the same filesystem label.

> As a consequence of all that, my wireless driver is unreachable so I have no
> wireless internet,

Eh? That makes no sense, unless you're keeping your drivers in non-standard
places. If so, this is why fitting in with your distro's standard locations
is a Good Idea.

> Thunderbird will not start (probably looking for the
> .thunderbird folder which has also vanished), and Firefox has lost almost
> all of the installed themes and extensions because they are not compatible
> with the 'new' 3.0b5 that comes with 8.04 (if I had known that a beta
> browser was to replace the previous one I might have thought twice about the
> upgrade). There's probably more but I'm not going looking for it just yet.
>
> All in all not a happy story, and I'm not best pleased with Ubuntu, but
> that's another story - but can anyone help me get my old data partition
> back? It's not something I want to just write off.

Check the output of 'mount' and you'll be able to see how your other
partitions are mounted. My guess is that your data partition is /dev/sda5,
but your previous mount point naming convention is bizarre and confusing.

> Neil.

HTH,
Alex.
-- 
Alex Butcher, Bristol UK.                           PGP/GnuPG ID:0x5010dbff

"[T]he whole point about the reason why I think it is important we go for
identity cards and an identity database today is that identity fraud and
abuse is a major, major problem. Now the civil liberties aspect of it, look
it is a view, I don't personally think it matters very much."
  - Tony Blair, 6 June 2006 <http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page9566.asp>