Hi everyone. I've gotten myself into a rather bad situation. I was having some troubles with a '.ICEauthority' error, and I found a post suggesting that I uninstall gnome and then re-install it.

So I went ahead and did it, but I must have done something wrong. Now when I boot up, I have no Linux option from the grub menu. I have a windows partition on the drive, and I'm on an Ubuntu 10.10 live USB right now. My file system is still intact, so I haven't lost any important information.

I tried to back up my files, but there wasn't enough room in any single hard drive that I had, so the files were saved half on an external HD and half on my windows partition. I think it's safe, but I can't be gauranteed that everything copied properly.

I want to reinstall Ubuntu on the old partition without wiping out all of my files. Is this possible? What's the best way to recover my linux OS? I have some ideas, but I don't know if they'd work or how to go about executing them.

Thanks All!

do you have a seperate partition for your data under Linux ? if yes so you can reinstall by telling the installer to not format the partition that contains your data.

if no so you can try reinstalling but be carrefull you'll have to do a manual paritioning and DON'T format any partition juste tell the mount point of each partition, maybe it works I've never tried it.

spring logout

Thanks allwimb.
I used the Live CD installer, and had to select the 'advanced' partitioning feature. I set my old partitions back to ext4 and set the mount points for /home /boot and /

The installation ran fine and I now have all of my files in a new version of Ubuntu 10.10. I did lose all of my preferences (obviously) and it looks like some programs will take some adjusting, but otherwise I escaped this scary situation unscathed.

Thanks LQ!

Good for you, now it's time to work out a good backup plan.

Kind regards

I still wonder how reinstalling the desktop could have messed up you system that bad.

The desktop isn't integrated into the system, it's just a stand-alone application no different from any other application.

I had been having issues (and still am) with software authentication. My guess is that something important wasn't reinstalled properly because of this.

Edit: Losing my OS fried my mind a bit. What happened was I uninstalled and then reinstalled GNOME and some related packages. Upon restarting, I had an issue with "low graphics mode" that wouldn't let me access the desktop. I dropped into the command line and ran something to repair broken packages (dpkg something). I don't remember what else I did, but eventually my opening GRUB display didn't have ubuntu on it.

I probably miscopied or misapplied a step from a forum. I don't have a ton of knowledge about linux (obviously) so I'm often left trying to scrape together solutions from other forum users. live and learn.