No write access to home directory after a fresh install

Lordandmaker · 05-12-2006, 03:12 PM

I've just installed (or tried to) Kubuntu 5.10, downloaded off their site, onto a new machine (X86-64).

I've changed distros from Mandriva, so i wanted it to just mount my old home directory as my new one. But it will only mount it as read-only, so I can't get KDE up. If i try

Code:

sudo startx

it still won't read the partition. I have got KDE up logged in as root once, but I don't remember how, and can't seem to manage it again.

My fstab looks like this:

Code:

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
proc            /proc           proc    defaults        0       0
/dev/sda1       /               ext3    defaults,errors=remount-ro 0       1
/dev/sda6       /home           ext3    defaults,rw       0       2
/dev/hda1       /media/windows    ntfs    defaults        0       0
/dev/sda5       none            swap    sw              0       0
/dev/hdd        /media/cdrom0   udf,iso9660 user,noauto     0       0
/dev/hdc        /media/cdrom1   udf,iso9660 user,noauto     0       0
/dev/fd0        /media/floppy0  auto    rw,user,noauto  0       0

I put the 'rw' on the /dev/sda6 line, but it didn't make much difference.

FYI, there is one HDD with Windows on it, and another split into three partitions (/, swap, /home).

Any ideas on how to get KDE up?

pljvaldez · 05-12-2006, 03:32 PM

I'm guessing that the problem is that the UID of the /home partition is different than the new Ubuntu install. Not sure what Mandriva uses for their default UID's, but Ubuntu I believe starts at 1000 (i.e. the user you created during install probably has UID=1000). I think the way around this is to make it defaults,UID=1000,GID=1000(?). No expert, but I feel like I had this problem once many moons ago...

Or maybe you can sudo chown username:groupname /home so that it changes to your new user...

starkes · 05-13-2006, 05:09 AM

on the line for your home folder, replace "defaults,rw" with "iocharset=utf8,umask=000"

no quotations though, of course, and this should work i think. i just did a similar thing on 2 ubuntu systems to fix permissions and it worked

Lordandmaker · 05-13-2006, 05:49 PM

I fixed it in the end, not with either of those methods, though...

I tried appending uid=1000 and gid=1000, and neither worked, so i booted into Knoppix, and did

Code:

chown -R 1000 /dev/sda6

as root, and then it worked fine!

(except my sound problems in another thread)

Cheers!