[ping seanh] Re: log in problem

[Ash Wyllie]

NoOp opined

I didn't see the original repl for some reasson.

>On 10/03/2010 03:44 PM, Thierry de Coulon wrote:
>> On Monday 04 October 2010, Ash Wyllie wrote:
>>> I can't log onto my laptop from the internal drive.
>>>
>>> I can use the computer a USB stick.
>>>
>>> I can see that the drive is there, that all the data is on it, and that
>>> there is no free space (0 bytes) on the drive.
>> 
>> That may be the key of your problem: no place, the system can't create
>> logs. How is your disk partitioned? "A la Windows", with one big partition
>> and  everything in it?

That is my suspicion. The disk was partitioned by Dell at the factory, and came
with Ubuntu installed. There is a 3GB swap  partition and a 117GB Ubuntu
partition.

How does one get permission to do file deletes while using a USB stick?

>> 
>>> When I try to log in, there is a notice
>>>
>>> "INSTALL PROBLEM
>>>
>>> The comfiguration of dedfaults for Gnome Power Management have not been
>>> installled properly
>>>
>>> Please  contact your computer administrator."
>>>
>>> Is there some way to get at the hard drive and delete a couple files?
>> 
>> I'm not sure to understand "I can use the computer a USB stick". Anyway,
>> you  should find a way to boot from a live system (USB stick or live CD),
>> then  mount your disk/partition and, as root, you should ne able to delete
>> files.

I can boot from the USB stick. But I don't have permissions to do anything
useful, like deleting  files.

I did find how to boot into recovery mode. I then did
"rm BigRedundantDirectory" which didn't help. The directory is gone, but no
space was freed up.

Now that I am in recovery mode, is there a way to force Ubuntu to validate the
disk?

>> You can also check the size of the directories, most probably /home/<your 
>> user>. If one directory is _very_ big, then the file to delete is there.
>> 
>> If a program get's stuck in an error loop, it may fill up your disk space
>> with  a huge error log. That's why /home should _always_ be on a separate 
>> partition, so if your home directory get's full, you can still log in as
>> root  to clear space (that's where Ubuntu's policy bites back as you'll
>> have to do  this at the command line...)

I looked, there are no 8GB (which was the old free space size) files.

>> Hope that helps
>> 
>> Thierry

>Other than the 0 bytes, the gnome power manager error msg sounds exactly
>like the problem that seanh was having in the "Can't login into Gnome
>after updates yersterday (10.04" [1]. I wonder if this is becoming a trend.


                         -ash
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