[Closed] Messed my logins after an unclean boot/shutdown

[surio]

Please help.
I have clobbered my 64-bit porteus' settings (it seems to me).

I use a short USB extension cord to plug USBs into my Laptop -- helps in accessibility and accidentally bashing the usb drives sometimes.

Anyway, sometimes the cords just don't work well and fail! (Chinese goods, unreliable, etc.) One such occasion happened now, and I powered-off unclean.

Since then, I cannot seem to get Porteus to boot directly into the KDE session.

When I choose KDE on the GRUB screen, I am taken to a completely new bright blue login screen with clock on the panel with quite a few user options on the left (avahi, gdm, mysql, pop, apache, etc, etc.). From this screen, even if I choose KDE session, I get a rxvt terminal, turquoise screen and nothing else!

If I choose LXDE, I get the login screen correctly. Then I choose for the KDE session there and log myself in. Now, KDE does manage to come on, but all my custom UI settings and preferences are gone. I might as well be logging into another system!

Any thoughts? How do I fix this? What lock file was written? Where? Are there even lock files ?

Thanks in advance.

[cttan]

Hi surio,

I have not encountered the menu you mentioned. But if the USB unable to boot with error message "Boot error", I would perform the Porteus-installer-for-Linux.com again.

[surio]

Clarification: It is not a "boot error" as suggested by another poster above.

I can select "KDE" in grub menu, but instead of taking into the normal session, I get a weird "Welcome to Linux at Porteus" menu with loads of options on the left (avahi, apache, mysql, etc). It is like I opened some secret portal!

But choosing guest and KDE does not take me to the plasma session! It opens an rxvt terminal

If I choose LXDE from GRUB menu, I get the LXDE login screen, and I can choose either LXDEKDE. But my personalised settings, clocks, language, are all not loaded.

Last but not least, wifi has also stopped working!

I am angry at myself for messing it up like this.

[Hamza]

This appear to be a change corruption. Backup your home folder, clean up your change folder/container, boot up on the clean version without your changes, after being on the desktop, restor your home folder.

[surio]

This appear to be a change corruption.

Oh, good! It means I'm on too higher things Kill a few, kill a million, etc.....

Backup your home folder,

This should be easy! Copy /guest directory to another pen-drive!

clean up your change folder/container, boot up on the clean version without your changes, after being on the desktop, restor your home folder.

These few lines here are to be awarded, "understatement of the year" award
Man, I would definitely appreciate some more detailed set of instructions here...

For example, I am confused: When I back up the guest dir, am I supposed to delete all the personalisations?
Then, when I clean up my "change folder" -- this is where the dir where my dat file is stored, right?
How exactly is one supposed to clean it up please?

Thanks.

P.S: I will be logged online. If you come to "minichat", you can provide ad-hoc rapidfire instructions for me to work on!

[Hamza]

What are you using as value in changes cheatcode? A container (.dat file) or a folder?

[surio]

Hamza,
I use a dat file. But it is stored inside a custom created directory, in the same USB that I am booting porteus from.

I am sorry for not thanking you in the earlier post. Apologies.

Thanks for offering your help.

Best,
surio.

[surio]

Hi Hamza,
I managed to recover from rigor mortis paralytis and gave it a shot to follow your instructions and repair stuff...

I logged into a KDE session via the LXDE login screen.

I have backed up my entire /guest directory. I also backed up my container *.dat file

Then, I used the Porteus Save file manager and repaired the corrupt dat file. My log file gave this message:

Code: Select all

Phase 1 - find and verify superblock...
Cannot get host filesystem geometry.
Repair may fail if there is a sector size mismatch between
the image and the host filesystem.
Phase 2 - using internal log
        - zero log...
ERROR: The filesystem has valuable metadata changes in a log which needs to
be replayed.  Mount the filesystem to replay the log, and unmount it before
re-running xfs_repair.  If you are unable to mount the filesystem, then use
the -L option to destroy the log and attempt a repair.
Note that destroying the log may cause corruption -- please attempt a mount
of the filesystem before doing this.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,
surio.

[Hamza]

I'm not the author of this tool. Fanthom should be able to answer you better.

My instructions more detailed.

1. Boot up in Always Fresh
2. Mount your container (.dat file) using mloop command in a terminal
3. Backup your home's folder
4. Remove everything in your container using a command like

   Code: Select all

   rm -r /mnt/loop/*

5. Remove hidden files too

   Code: Select all

   rm -r /mnt/loop/.*

6. Make the folder /mnt/loop/home/guest and change the ownership to guest.

   Code: Select all

   chown guest:guest /mnt/loop/home/guest

7. Restore your data previously backed up by copy and pasting them into /mnt/loop/home/guest
8. Don't forget (only in case you're using root when doing these actions) to give ownership to all of your files.

   Code: Select all

   chown guest:guest /mnt/loop/home/guest -R

9. After files copied, un-mount your container using the command

   Code: Select all

   uloop

10. Reboot using your container like usual

[surio]

@Hamza,
Late last night (my time zone), I accidentally caught up with @fanthom on mChat. He gave me a terse set of instructions on how to do this. You have expanded upon his instructions in detail. Thank you very much for the detailed set of instructions. I followed them to a "T".

I made backups of my container dat file and my "guest" dir before setting off on your instruction set.

I am able to directly log into my KDE session from GRUB, instead of that hideous blue login screen. Thanks.

But there are a couple of issues I am still facing.

First issue is that my default login settings are very messed up.

Here's Always Fresh:

And here's how my KDE login looks like:
It used to look like above with extra icons like Emacs and Sublime Text on the Quicklaunch! My taskbar looks bad, the quicklaunch items are not there and the background has also gone! Very surprising!

But the other big problem is that there seems to be absolutely nothing stored in my dat file anymore.

If I run mloop on the container file, I get some error (which goes away too quickly for me to read) and I end up getting this:

Code: Select all

#################################
Your data file has been mounted at:
/mnt/loop

You can unmount it by typing uloop

Here is a list of the files:

As you can see there is nothing on the loop. I don't see anyting in file manager either.

Any thoughts?

Thanks again for your help.
S.

[Hamza]

Please create a new .dat container and copy over it all your backed up data as per my "detailed" instructions in the last post.

[surio]

@Hamza,

I did what you suggested and recreated the "guest" dir in a new dat container. Same problems as above.

I got fed up of this non progress, so based on my memory recall, I spent the last few hours reinstalling Porteus 64 from scratch and recreated everything back to the way it was before I messed up!

I lost some things from my home, but nothing serious.

The best part of this whole thing is that I am now very familiar with the Porteus system in the last few days, and I have learnt one or two new things about porteus -- mloop is just a fantastic way of debugging the dat files (neat idea @fanthom)!

Anyway, given that I cheated and took another way out, I am going to mark the thread as "Closed" instead of "Solved". Hope that is ok for the mods.

Now, let's get on with some work!

Thanks.