A most basic question

[Zweitaktmotor]

Did UP5 last night and everything seemed to go well, until I decided to reboot the machine. It loads lots of services and then goes into the terminal screen. I can log in and get the user@machine: prompt.

But what next? I cannot remember what I need to do to start the GUI (MATE in my case).

Many thanks.

[Zweitaktmotor]

After several reboot attempts, I noticed an error message: Mounting local file systems ... failed

Looks like this could be the problem.

There is also an orange warning message flashing past, but it disappears too quickly to read.

[Zweitaktmotor]

When I type in startx, I get a totally black screen. The screensaver kicks in after a few minutes, so there must be something, but I cannot see it.

[Zweitaktmotor]

If I log in as root, I actually get the Mint wallpaper and the welcome screen (new features, known issues etc.), but I cannot activate any of the entries, only get a message "Google Chrome cannot be run as root".

ALT-F1 to call up the menu does not work either.

Still trying and hoping I get everything back without having to go through a complete re-install.

[Zweitaktmotor]

I found that I can call

startx [program]

to use Firefox etc. But this is still very basic and nowhere near the Mint experience I am used to. No menu, no status bar etc.

Any more tips?

[naughty_bit]

try to install mint-meta-debian-core and mint-meta-debian-cinnamon or mate, whichever DE you use..

[Zweitaktmotor]

Ah, perhaps I am getting somewhere:

I tried your suggestion with sudo apt-get install and got a long list of output which essentially seemed to suggest that older packages would be replacing newer ones. At the bottom, I got a message saying:

"Try apt-get -f install without any options."

This I did and it worked for a while and at the bottom, I got a message saying:

"Errors were encountered while processing:
/var/cache/apt/archives/gnome-desktop3-data_3.4.2-1_all.deb
E:Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)"

Problem is: I don't even think I have a proper network connection, but I can boot from CD and copy the file over from this PC. Hope I will find it somewhere for individual download.

Will try that now unless you have a better idea.

[naughty_bit]

Not sure, seems the system is somehow completely borked. I'm not sure what to suggest you to try at this point. Can you post contents of fstab? You've said it fails to mount filesystem?

[Zweitaktmotor]

1. Yes, I had a mounting error. fstab says (only quoting the relevant bits):

/dev/sdb1 (this is my normal boot drive)

UUID= [blablabla] / ext4 rw,errors=remount-ro 0 1

This reminds me of a problem I regularly have with USB sticks: They will be set to read-only status for no apparent reason and only formatting them will get rid of the problem.

It looks like this now happened with my HD (which is actually a 64GB solid state disk).

If it has errors, how do you check and correct them? Even if I could run some form of DOS or Windows, CHKDSK would not know what to do with an ext4 partition.

Perhaps I could try testdisk...


2. I noticed a second red message immediately before I am taken to the terminal prompt, but it goes away so quickly that I cannot see what it is about. Is there any way to let LMDE boot step by step? DOS used to have such an option, giving you time to read the output.

[naughty_bit]

well, it remounts read only so any check will be useless. you can run try running fsck from live media?

And for boot errors type dmesg after booting and see if anything stands out.