user failures

[Gene Heskett]

On Saturday 05 January 2008, John Summerfield wrote:
>Gene Heskett wrote:
>> Greetings;
>>
>> I had my boot drives partition table zeroed out last night by something
>> unk, and then X froze.
>
>Coincidentally, I've just had a kubuntu system destroy itself. It was
>installed as 7.04, upgraded to 7.10.
>
>Much to my astonishment, the system (cheap ASUS mobo, socket-A CPU, via
>chipset, generic) can suspend and hibernate, and power up on keypress.
>
>As best I can figure it, this is the sequence of events.
>
>I powered down, presumably using the new-found hibernate ability.
>
>I booted, chose a XEN-capable kernel. It might have been a 7.04 kernel,
>I couldn't see one obviously for 7.10.
>
>I shut down.
>
>I booted, chose the latest (non-XEN) kernel.
>
>It resumed!
>
>I used it for a time.
>
>I shut down.
>
>I rebooted.
>
>Now, we have a complicating factor: I use VGA=791, but with this kernel
>framebuffer does not work so I'm booting blind: nothing to see until X
>starts.
>
>Anyway, Nothing visible happened for a long time.
>
>I reset, then booted with VGA=6.
>
>System booted for manual fsck.
>
>I thought unkind thoughts about people who write fsck programs whose
>reports and messages are entirely incomprehensible to all but the
>highest of high priests, and ran
>e2fsck -y /dev/hda6
>
>There were lots and lots of messages about blocks being zeroed and/or
>freed and e2fsck restarting.
>
>Eventually, it finshed and ^D lead to a reboot.
>
>Later, I ran cfdisk to see what the partition table is, for reasons
>nothing to do with the above problems.
>
>cfdisk declined to do anything, but fdisk is happy to have a look.
>
>The partition table includes logs of hooley, with overlapping partitions
>and general mess.
>
>"reinstall" comes to mind. Fortunately, hda7 seems okay. I've copied it
>to another drive.
>
>I've looked around, everything seems to work, _but_ I don't see how or
>why I should trust it.
>
>Fortunately, "reinstall" was close to the top of the agenda for this
>box, and the main question was "with what?"
>
>Disk drive checks ok with smartctl and there are no errors logged to
>syslog.. Drive had about 345 power-on hours, shouldn't have expired yet.
>
>
>Choices are SL5, C5 and (possibly) Debian.
>
>Makes me wonder whether there might have been something unusual going on
>in your system,
>
>
I have f8 (latest i386 respin dvd) installed on it now, and have about got 
everything configured, but its been an interesting ride so far.

One instant problem is bothering me, it appears that my kmail filters menu 
survived the recovery from an amrecover session, but it is now immutable, so 
I can't add some of the new aliases to a filter rule.  I can add them to the 
filter screen, but when I click the apply button, anything I've added is 
reverted to the original.  

Now, the weirdsville part is that I can open 
the /root/.kde/share/config/kmailrc with less or vim, and the rules I've 
added ARE there.

That files perms are:
-rw------- 1 root root 99100 2008-01-05 22:31 /root/.kde/share/config/kmailrc

Can someone else please do an ls -l on their file and show me what it has for 
perms on your f8 machine that can successfully edit those filter rules.

I've nuked /root/kmailrc, and then restarted kmail as root, with no visible 
effect.  The edits are lost the instant I click 'apply'

Am I barking up the wrong tree here or what?

Thanks John and to anybody else that wants to chime in with helpfull info 
here, I'm plumb bumfuzzled from lack of sleep (a graveyard session at the 
transmitter last night also turned into a nightmare) and this whole damned 
zeroed out partition table fiasco.

And as I add stuff back, selinux is being a PITA, so I may yet  
touch /.autorelabel and reboot, but there are no messages about that above 
file.  Nor are there any messages about it in setroubleshoot's display.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Too much is just enough.
		-- Mark Twain, on whiskey