Non-booting machine and missing user rights on USB drives

[chris]

which is why the long term support versions should be used on production
machines.
The six monthly releases are not generally stable enough for working
systems, unless you are one of those who are capable of in depth
triaging and system maintenance
Cheers the kiwi

On Mon, 2010-01-11 at 12:46 +0200, Ari Torhamo wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Someone just sent a message to me that Ubuntu (9.10) machine that I
> maintain has stopped working. The boot process stops somewhere in the
> middle, and this message is shown:
> "One or more of the mounts listed in etc/fslab (tai fstab) cannot yet be
> mounted: /home:waiting for UUID=dd2d0d0 [...] Press ESC to enter a
> recovery shell."
> And after pressing ESC, this:
> ""General error mounting filesystems. A maintenance shell will now be
> started. 
> Control-D will terminate this shell and re-try." root@****-deskstop:~#" 
> The problem came up on the last friday, when the machine was booted for
> the first time after the previous tuesday. The user thinks that some
> updates were offered and installed on tuesday, but the machine wasn't
> rebooted then. Does anyone know, if there are others who have had
> problems with the last weeks updates and if there's a simple solution
> for the situation? I googled for the error message, but didn't get any
> helpful results. If it gets complicated, I'll go there myself and just
> reinstall Ubuntu - after doing a hard drive health check (on the other
> hand Windows works normally, so there likely is nothing wrong with the
> hard drive).
> 
> I advised the user to use the live CD for necessary work until we get
> the problem fixed. He then reported that he is not allowed to access
> he's files on his USB drive, because he doesn't have the rights to do
> so! :-o The same thing happened recently to the user of another machine
> that I maintain: he attached an external USB drive to his system, and
> everything worked nice and fine otherwise, but he wasn't allowed to
> write into the drive because he didn't have the rights. This is
> something I have to say I don't understand: why do users have to face
> this kind of usability in 2010, when Linux and Ubuntu have been in the
> existence for so long. I remember the user rights issue of Ubuntu being
> discussed a few years ago, and according to my memory the outcome was
> that the problem was being worked on and it was going to go away soon.
> Why then, in 2010, users still aren't given rights to their own devices
> that they plug in into their own computers?
> 
> >From the tone of the voice I can tell, that the person with non-booting
> machine isn't too happy with Ubuntu any more :-/ He used to be
> understanding with problems, but they just keep coming. I used to oppose
> the idea that one Ubuntu release should be used just for fixing bugs,
> but now I'm beginning to think that perhaps it's a good idea. I applaud
> the great progress that has been made in so many areas, but
> unfortunately the amount of bugs that many users face lay a shadow above
> these achievements.
> 
> -Ari-
> 
>