Desktop vanished/corrupted?
 

I tried to save an image about five minutes ago and it wouldn't work. I got a message about something crashing which I didn't think to write down. I rebooted and now my desktop is grey with several red Xs near the top. Luckily Firefox popped up since it was open when I restarted so I can get to this page. I got an error message about a URL not being able to be opened but Firefox came up too quickly for me to write it all down. One had something to do with Kget and one with Lancelot. I tried lowering the window but there's no task bar and I couldn't get back to Firefox, and the messages had gone anyway. I've rebooted twice more since that first time, the third to bring Firefox up to ask for help.
I downgraded KDE earlier as was suggested by a reply I found while google searching because Dolphin kept freezing and crashing, and it seemed ok at the time. That was a few hours ago and everything has been working well until now.
I'm in the middle of writing a novel and if the task bar etc. are gone and I can't even open a terminal then I have no idea how to get my files back. Please help. :cry:


edit - managed to minimalise the window and one error remains this time. :

URL cannot be listed
file:///home/laura/.kde4/share/apps/lancelot/systemservices
Clicking ok on that one gives another:
file:///home/laura/.kde4/share/apps/lancelot/newdocuments
Then
file:///home/laura/.kde4/share/apps/lancelot/RecentDocuments

It seems that BASH (the most common Linux shell) does not recognize this command. You could try ksh, csh, or some other shell.

I'm sorry, which command? I haven't tried to enter any. I can't open a terminal or anything else. I can only use Firefox because it opens automatically. I've tried the repair option on the cd but it's asking for a password I don't have and I can't even install RPMs.

Hahahahahahahaha......:twocents:

I know HOW to install RPMs, obviously. The corruption is preventing them from installing.

Nice to know there are good helpful people here though. Thanks. -.-

Read the rules before posting and you'll be glad to know that there are even more helpful people here.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/...Ask_a_Question

I did read them quite a while ago. And I didn't just write the word urgent on its own. I also wrote a rough summary of the problem. Either way this site is meant to be helpful and this IS the newbie forum. All those kind of replies are going to do are damage the site's reputation.

Words like urgent are not appreciated here. This is a forum were volunteers spend their free time to help people with their Linux problems. Demanding special attention is quite rude in this context.

But anyways, to your problem: If this happened when you were saving data to your drive I would guess that your disk may be full. Please post the output of the command Since you don't seem to have a terminal window accessible you can either try to get one with pressing Alt+F2 and typing konsole into that window, or you can change to a text terminal with Ctrl+Alt+F1, logging in, launch the command. After that you can switch back to the GUI with Alt+F7.

By the way, I hope you realized now how crucial it is to backup your valuable data on a regular basis.

I wasn't trying to ask for 'special attention'. For me, it is urgent as that hard-drive has some very important files on it but I certainly wasn't expecting anyone to drop everything to fix it. There is just a bit of a difference between minor slightly annoying bugs and something which makes a computer completely unusable. Those kinds -purposely- rude replies are unnecessary.

I was only trying to save a small image and had something like 200GB free. Everything else was saving as normal. I was just getting crash reports from trying to save images from sites. I tried two or three images on two or three sites before restarting. Some of the files are backed up, but the more recent updates from the past couple of days haven't been yet.

Thank you for the suggestions, anyway. I'll try opening a terminal in the morning and post the result.

Well, if you have such amount of space free then it is possibly not the lack of space, but a real hardware failure.
I would recommend to boot from a Live-CD, like the SystemRescueCD and backup your data to an external storage before doing anything else. After you have done this try to repair the filesystems on your harddisk, if they are damaged and may be look for hardware errors. If you need help with that feel free to post here.

That's what I was afraid of. Luckily I still have Live CDs from attempts to fix a previous problem so I'll try those too.

Your errors so far seem to do with lancelot and maybe the Desktop directory. See if the /home/laura/.kde4/share/apps/lancelot/ directories were trashed. If launching konqueror from the menu doesn't work (try the F2 key to launch it) or use a terminal instead.

One technique to determine whether you have a KDE configuration error is to create a new user. Do the problems persist? If not, system files were not corrupted.

You said you were trying to save an image. An image of what? A back up image of your hard disk?

Unfortunately I don't see a way to do much of anything on there. I have no icons or task bar. Just a grey background with red Xs and Firefox. I could try looking up a way to do it through Konsole if I can get that to open.

And sorry, I meant image as in a picture rather than a disk image. Just a regular right-click-save-as thing.

You could try backing up the .kde and .kde4 directories from a live distro. Reboot and let KDE repopulate its hidden directories.
Before that, from the live distro use "fsck" to check the file systems. A corrupted filesystem or bad disk might have caused the crash and later problems.

Back to the problem at hand: If it were me, I would try to find some way to boot the command line, login as root, and create a new user, then try startx as the new user. If new user is able to startx, that would indicate the problem is in one of your old user's desktop configuration files.

Just a shot in the dark.

Thankyou for the suggestions.

Unfortunately creating a new user didn't fix anything, however and neither did repopulating the directories. I'm afraid I forgot about fsck though. I did manage to backup my files using a LiveCD, however. And I have also now tried wiping the hard drive and completely reinstalling Suse. It seemed to install well at first, but when rebooted after installing updates and drivers, I got an error message which told me that the file system was broken and I had to manually repair it. Thinking something must have installed incorrectly, I wiped and tried again and the same thing happened. It's sounding more like a problem with the actual hard drive to me now. It was a replacement sent to me by the manufacturer to replace a previous faulty hard drive. Perhaps they have a design flaw. I ran tests in advance of installing first time around to make sure that the hardware was supported, and this hard drive lasted several months instead of the three weeks it took for the last one to go wrong. I'm sure it's not the laptop that's affected it, as the replacement was actually put into a different laptop, which I also tested in advance.

But just in case, this is the output of df -h previous to reinstalling:

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mountedon

rootfs 20G 17G 2.3G 88% /
devtmpfs 998M 220K 998M 1% /dev
tmpfs 994M 3.9M 990M 1% /dev/shm
/dev/sda2 20G 17G 2.3G 88% /
/dev/sda3 272G 133G 138G 50% /home

So there was a little less space than I thought, but still plenty left.

Corrupted filesystems are mainly caused by to problems:
1. A faulty harddisk.
2. Faulty RAM.

I would recommend to use the harddisk manufacturer's diagnosis tool and Memtest86+ for testing the hardware.