[Wylug-help] Mandrake has seriously screwed up just by doing media updates

[Anne Wilson]

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On Saturday 15 Jan 2005 16:44, you wrote:
>
> Reinstalling is my concern exactly for the reasons that you outline.  My
> particular problem though is that after doing the initial media updates,
> the 'behaviour' of the reboot, was that of a fresh install (once I'd logged
> in that is) in that the Mandrake Welcome window appeared, and of course the
> apps my work had just 'vanished'. All my bookmarks have gone too.  Though
> there is the puzzle of the shell line in console 'bash-2.05b$'
>
I wonder if that means that you can't access your home directory because perms
have been affected?  It's hard to see how that could have happened, but worth
a thought.  Try this:

Boot up, and when the lilo screen comes up hit 'Esc' and type 'linux 1'.  This
will bring up a text screen, and you are to all intents and purposes running
as root.  See whether you can cd to your home directory and ls the contents.

If you can, check ownership and perms with an 'ls -al' command.  That might
give us a clue what's happening.

>  /home is on a separate partition - now to all intents and purposes, I can
> cope with the loss of apps, I can always reinstall
> (firfox/thunderbird/StarOffice7) but the work which was saved there cannot
> be seen at all.  So I'm unable to recover my work. I've installed a knoppix
> disk - and again I can't see anything of my work folders (though to be
> honest, I'm not sure I'm using it properly as a recovery tool).
>
> There is a small breadcrumb to all of this.  On the task bar, instead of
> the StarOffice7 icon, its been replaced by the blue cogged wheel icon.
> Clicking on this brings a KDE error which says:
>
> The desktop entry file
> /home/chris/.kde/share/apps/kicker/staroffice7-4.desktop has no Type=...
> entry.
>
> This is the only trace that the StarOffice app even existed!
>
So you are able to run kde?  While you are in single-user mode, in your home
directory try 'mv .kde .kdeold'.  If kde configs are screwed up this often
cures it.  You can get your bookmarks etc back from .kdeold, and .kde will be
re-created when you restart kde.

A few thoughts, anyway.

Anne
- --
Registered Linux User No.293302
Have you visited http://twiki.mdklinuxfaq.org yet?  Mandrake at all levels
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