Xubuntu 20.04 disaster

[MR ZenWiz]

On Thu, Nov 19, 2020 at 6:22 PM Ralf Mardorf via ubuntu-users
<ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, 19 Nov 2020 17:24:33 -0800, MR ZenWiz wrote:
> >> If you run something like:
> >>
> >>    cd /
> >>    sudo mount /home
> >>
> >> does it work and do the files come back?
> >>
> >I will try that when the backup is complete.
>
> That /home isn't mounted was my first and only guess, too.
> The only thing else I can imagine is a package installed by a third
> party repository was running a malicious script.
>
My sincerest apologies.  I have been having brain farts a lot since I
came out of a COVID coma seven months ago.

The disk was in fact partitioned properly - one for root and one for
/home.  /home was corrupted (a bunch of files needed fixed), but I a)
completely forgot I made this intelligent move when I reinstalled the
OS back in June, and b) didn't notice when I ran gparted from the
Xubuntu boot flash drive live that there were two ext4 partitions on
the hard drive, not only 1.  Not quite sure how that escaped my
notice.

When I reinstalled, the system still refused to come up - after I
modified /etc/fstab to bring up /home on the correct partition.  At
that point I finally realized what was going on and ran fsck on /home,
and there were a bunch of errors that got fixed.  After that, the
reboot worked properly and is happily humming away.

Here are some things I notice now in retrospect:

1) This was an upgraded system that failed.  Still not sure why.
2) Before the failure, LibreOffice was not starting up properly -
something was interfering with it coming up, and running it from the
command line did not show me anything I recognized as problematic.
3) Chrome was already set to the default browser, but it wasn't
starting up properly (all indirect starts brought up Firefox and I
couldn't modify this).
4) I'm not sure why the file system was so corrupt, but apparently the
update and full-upgrade triggered something that precipitated this
result.

Thank you to all who responded.  I have learned once again that Linux
distros can be easy to fix when something goes wrong, assuming that
the admin doesn't lose his marbles and forget some basic, however
intricate, precautions have been set up (and then fails to notice them
when he is flailing around trying not to drown on dry land).

Two points for Linux and minus ten for me.  I'll have to earn them back...

Thanks to all for your patience and kind assistance.  I should know
better - I've been doing home Linux sysadmin work for almost 14 years
straight now, 10 in X/Ubuntu

Mark