Mark A. Taff wrote:
On Wednesday 14 December 2005 16:39, B Stia wrote
Now, the system will boot into SuSE but will drop back to a command prompt. I can log in as root and cd into any of my directories, including /var and then -ls to see what is in there. All OK. But when I cat etc/fstab the /var line is not there. The old directory /partition which I deleted remains in that file. Sooo, I am pretty sure (hopefully) that if I can edit fstab I can make it OK again.
That is because the repair tool put /var on the / partition, instead of on it's own partition. So you do not need an fstab line to mount a partition that doesn't exist. ;-)
Hmmmm..... That should have been a :-( Wonderful. I guess that is why, when I tried to reinstall the system from the install command, it told me I had to delete files from the / partition because it was full. Didn't understand what that was at the time. Guess I am screwed and need to do a reinstall. Really hate to do that because I have so many extra programs and have updated 9.2 to almost 10.0 configuration. That includes KDE and Xine and my DVD stuff etc. etc.
As another poster said, adding another disk, then `rsync`ing /home over to the new disk is a great way to add room to a system. I weekly rsync every /home on my network to an old PII machine as a painless easy backup.
Welllll.... I have backed up /home and a few other important directories to my other hard drive using kdar. They are inaccessible right now but could be restored with a new install.
vi has two modes, a command mode and an insert mode (text mode). The command `i` begins text mode, and `[esc]` ends text mode. See:
http://www.collaborium.org/onsite/venezuela/docs/linux/linux_guides/vi/#basi... for a basic tutorial.
Thanks for the link on the tutorial. Went and got it. Not very important right now since editing fstab is not an issue.
Seems like the major issue now is that you can't get a gui started. If that is so, try `telinit 5` as a first whack to see if you get lucky.
Failing that, `startkde`
The output from startkde should give you some indication of where the issue is.
Well....... telenit 5 worked but it didn't get me to a gui. Just another cli where I could log in as a user. Neither did kdestart, with an unknown command reply, or a startx which produced a "startx is not installed". I guess that my system, thanks to "repair system" and my ignorance is so screwed up that I have no choice except to reinstall. Maybe I will just get 10.0 and see if I can restore my /home and the other backed-up/important data without huge problems. Anyway, I thank you for your attempts to help me. Any other ideas/tips to restore this mess would certainly be welcomed. Bob S.