System Messed Up After Playing with /run

[stingray]

I think I seriously f%$#ed up my system. I was trying to fix some boot warnings (very much like this) I was getting (and hopefully get chromium to run) by following these directions. However, I got mixed up and ended up wiping out /var/run and /run.

Now the best I can get is command line root user in recovery mode. When I boot normally I just get stuck at a screen that says this:

Linux Mint Debian Edition stingray tty1
stingray login:

I'm OK with a clean install but I have /home on a separate disk (sdb) and while I can access /home in recovery mode I can't mount sdb1 while running the LiveDVD. I get this error when I try to mount any of my partitions:

Unable to mount *.* GB Filesystem

Error mounting: mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sd*#,
missing codepage or helper program or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try dmesg | tail or so

I also get the mount error for the partitions on sda when I boot.

I don't want to lose all my stuff. Can someone help me recover my installation or figure out if a new install will allow me to get at my /home HD?

[stingray]

Good news, the problem is not messing with run and my /home drive is fine. I did a clean install, switched /var/run and /run and everything is running fine (including Chromium) and it fixed the boot warnings. It must have something to do with the fact that I have the OS installed on multiple partitions.

Here is what I currently have installed:
sda1 /boot
sda2 /
sda6 /usr
sda7 /var
sda8 swap
sda9 /tmp

I would like to have /home on sdb1 but the install process doesn't let you do that so I moved /home after the install and it worked fine until I tried to move /run and /var/run. Then everything broke. I've tried it in the other order and I get all those mount errors again and you see the fallout in my post above.

I'm thinking of mounting sdb1 somewhere else and symlinking all the home folders or just not using home for anything. It's kind of annoying, though. Can anybody shed light on this?

[äxl]

Are you affected by the bug you linked to? Normally you shouldn't mess with any /run
How are you trying to mount? Looks like a GUI output or do you use terminal?

[stingray]

Before I switched /var/run and /run I was getting these warnings during the boot sequence as well as line that repeated about 50 times "shm_open() has failed" or something like that, I'm not certain that's exactly what it said. And Chromium wouldn't run so I tried to start it from a terminal and I got an error that it couldn't run because shm was an endless loop. But switching /var/run and /run fixed those warnings and now Chromium runs so I'm fairly confident that solved a problem. I assume that's the bug you were talking about.

As far as mounting, I pretty much just edited /etc/fstab to mount sdb1 on /home, copied the system files over and rebooted. It worked fine for a few days the first time I did it until I messed with run. I even tried doing it first thing after a clean install in recovery mode with the command line, no gui. When I encountered the unable to mount errors I was never able to get as far as a gui. It just stalled into a command line interface and it wasn't even as fully featured as the one you get when you choose it on purpose. No extra colors or formatting and some commands weren't available.

I used a couple different live CDs (which did properly load) to see if I could access sdb1 but I got the same mount errors and that was in a gui.

Currently I can mount sdb1, so I might add it to fstab at /media/mystuff or something like that. I'm not really interested in trying it at /home again and losing my settings and all that.

[äxl]

You linked to bug #635473. Normally you don't just use solutions if you're not affected. But if it helped ...
Also normally everything /run related is mounted on RAM disc (tmpfs). It's standard and you shouldn't have to add it to fstab. (This should be in /etc/init.d/mountkernfs.sh.)
Also you propably know that you mount devices with UUID instead of sdX because these change at the next start.

[stingray]

I see what you mean, this post said that having /var on its own partition could cause these problems and the same poster then linked to that bug report. It seemed to solve the same problem I was having for those in that thread so I tried it as well and it worked for me. I did not add /run to fstab because the comments on step #2 said it should be automatic.

Regarding the /home issue, I did use UUID in fstab. I did 4 or 5 clean installs that ended up breaking and one time I tried using /dev/sdb1 instead of UUID just to try something different but normally I do use UUID.

By the way, I really appreciate your help.