mint 16 will not load after installing E2fsprogs 1.42.8
 

Hello, I was trying to follow the commands on the E2fsprogs home page in the terminal and was unsuccessful. But now mint 16 will not load so I was trying to undo what I did using the root shell prompt. Any help or tips would be appreciated.
Thanks, Bob

Not much to go on...

1) Why were you trying to install it by hand instead of going through the software repository for your distro?
2) What commands were you following?
3) What do you mean by "unsuccessful"? Did it fail? How did it fail? What did you do and what did it say?
4) Now Mint "will not load"...what does that mean? What IS it doing? Is there a message? Error? Anything at all?

Linux isn't Windows. 99% of the time when there's a problem, it tells you exactly what the problem is and usually has suggestions for how to fix it.

I did install it through the distro but couldnt not find it so I went to their website and the commands were:
mkdir ../e2fsprogs-build &&
cd ../e2fsprogs-build &&
../e2fsprogs-1.42/configure --prefix=/usr --with-root-prefix=""\
--enable-elf-shlibs &&
make &&
make install &&
make install-libs &&
install-info /usr/share/info/libext2fs.info /usr/share/info/dir

It said "no such command". I closed the terminal but I think I was supposed to type stop. Then when I started the pc this morning, selected mint 16, I get a black screen with a pointer that I can move with the mouse. No error message.
I hope that this helps and thanks for helping.

What do you mean you couldn't find IT? There is no "it", that package is a collection of ext2 command line utilities, including mke2fs, resize2fs, tune2fs, e2fsck, and others. They should all have been installed when you installed the package through the package manager. Which one were unable to find?

As for those commands, did it say which one wasn't found? There are a lot of commands there, I'm guessing it was either make or install-info that wasn't found.

You should be able to reverse the installation by going to the e2fsprogs-build directory and running "make uninstall" and perhaps "make uninstall-libs".

I'm not sure if this attempted install caused the problems you're seeing or if it's just coincidence, but on a repo-centric distro like Mint, Ubuntu, etc. you should NEVER install or upgrade core system utilities from outside of the central package manager unless you know EXACTLY what you're doing and why. You'll end up with conflicting binaries and libraries and can kill your entire system.

I think I may have killed my system. I dont know how to get to e2fsprogs-build directory with the root shell prompt. Im lucky to have a working laptop. I will try to google it.
Thank you for your help
bob

If this is the recovery console, you may need to mount the system drive first, and then navigate to wherever it was you were running the commands from post #3. You can use "fdisk -l" and "df -h" to see what drives are on the system and which ones are currently mounted.

thanks. The drives show up. I just rebooted and the linux password screen appeared, I entered my password, hit enter and got the black screen with the pointer.
I will try to navigate to sda7 and find my mistake.
Thanks for you time and help.

Keep in mind that in the recovery console you may need to mount the drive explicitly and then chroot to the mount location before you'll be able to run any of the "make uninstall" commands to try and undo the installation.

You should also check the system and X11 log files to see if there are any suggestions about what might be going on in there. While moving to a new e2fsprogs outside of the package manager could potentially break quite a few things, I wouldn't think it would cause the problems you're seeing, unless those utilities are more tightly-integrated into the Mint boot process than I thought.

I rebooted again and selected petra and it loaded. I will try to educate my self enough to find what i did without messing things up again. serious learning curve. I like it though. windows is boring.
Thanks again for your help. Ill post my results here. I have to take a break for awhile.

Couldnt figure out how to undo what I did. I had to reinstall. This time I will be more careful. thanks for your help.