Hi there

I messed up..

I have a Compaq Presario laptop on which I've run Suse 10.2 for many months. It dual boots with XP, but I very rarely use Windows now, and I am short of disc space, so I decided to delete all the windows programs, files and junk and reduce XP to a small partition that I could use if I ever need to use one or two specific applications.

I removed loads, then did a disc defrag - no probs so far. However, I then tried to reduce the windows partition with some Norton partition tool.... This failed, but messed up my Suse installation!

I log back on with Suse and my user account permissions have changed. On boot I get 10 or more error messages such as Nothing then works. If I click on an icon to start something, the small icon bounces up and down (with the egg timer at the bottom as normal), but it then just disappears!

Logging on as root works, but I'm struggling to change my home directory permissions (I don't fully understand how these permissions work!)

When logged on as root, I can use konqueror to navigate to my home directory. If I right click on 'adrian' folder as in /home/adrian I can then go to properties and look at the permissions tab. According to this, the This is correct isn't it?

How can I repair my Suse installation???
Thanks for looking.

I doubt the the permissions of the folders and files have changed. The filesystem itself was corrupted and so it was mounted read-only. You could try repairing the filesystem. You didn't mention what the filesystem is. It is probably one that you can use fsck for.

That sounds possible. The file system on my home partition is ext3. How do I use fsck - I haven't used it before. I tried it in a terminal and had a warning mesage that using this on a mounted filesystem could cause serious harm! I chose the 'no' option!

As the root user, you don't need the /home partition. If /home has its own partition, you could switch to a virtual terminal ( [CTRL]-[ALT]-F2 for example ). As root, you could unmount /home and then run the fsck command.

SuSE has a repair facility in the install disk. When the install program gets to asking you what kind of installation, new or upgrade, click on "Advanced .." or "Other ..." on the bottom of the page. Then select repair.

A third way is to enter "rescue" at the boot prompt. Then the filesystem is in ram, and the normal partitions aren't mounted.

Another way would be to boot to a rescue or live distro disc.

Thanks for the help and advice. I'll follow up your suggestions and see how it goes. I'll post up the results.

Once again, thanks.

Hi

I tried the repair facility on the installation disc... and you were right - two of the partitions were corrupted, including my home partition on /dev/hda6

The automatic repair wouldn't work (every time I clicked the 'repair' button, the dialog box instantly re-appeared) but the help file suggested using 'fsck.ext3' to repair the ext3 partition. I did 'fsck.ext3 -v dev/hda6' at the rescue prompt on rebooting, and another error message appeared telling me that the file system wasn't recognised on the partition!

This is SO annoying, I boot up XP and use it ONCE in several months and it trashes my Linux partitions.
Anyway, any more ideas??

Post here the partition table of /dev/hda and /etc/fstab, please. Backup all your data from /home partition. And from your Windows partition too.

Hi all

Some success! I again booted to 'rescue' and entered fsck.ext3 -v dev/hda6 at the prompt. This time there wasn't an error message and the checking process started. Those of you with more knowledge than me will know that choosing the -v or verbose mode was a mistake though! Every single bit of the whole partition seemed corrupt and for every bit i had a 'repair? <y/n?> option. having pressed the 'y' button thirty or more times, i then held it down for over 10 mins to speed things up!! having got bored with this I put a marker pen top of the 'y' key and balanced a baked beans tin on it. THIRTY mins later, the process finished! lol

Anyway, my home partition hda6 is now fixed and works perfectly. As Road map suggests above- I'm just about to back it up, along with my remaining XP stuff. One problem remains - my xp + linux shared vfat partition. I can read all the files on there (and will back them up in a moment) but if I attempt to modify and then save say an OOo document I get an instant crash of the program I'm using. I presume that I have the same corruption problem as on hda6, but how do i repair this?

If I boot in xp, chkdisc will probably startup and 'repair' the partition, but will this mess the rest up again? can i repair the vfat partition in linux? If so how? and will this mess up XP again?

Once solved I'm going to remove my hard drive and have a new linux only one. if I ever need XP then i can always put the disc back!

For the fat32 partition, you could backup the data, reformat the partition, and then restore the files from the backup. That way you will be assured that the filesytem is OK.