user failures

[Craig White]

On Sat, 2008-01-05 at 22:58 -0500, Gene Heskett wrote:
> 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.
----
we've been down this lane before...you shouldn't use GUI as root

anyway...

$ ls -l ~/.kde/share/config/kmailrc
-rw------- 1 craig craig 113235 2007-11-25
10:11 /home/craig/.kde/share/config/kmailrc

yes, I would boot/relabel

Craig