Hi all. I'm having a strange series of problems that have culminated in my sound card driver disappearing; it's a long story, and I'm going to try very hard to keep it as short as possible, without leaving out something that may be the key to solving this.
It started simply enough: I wanted to copy a file. I have Ubuntu Dapper Drake running smoothly on my machine, and I just wanted to move a file from an ntfs drive to a fat32 drive. I have ntfs-3g installed and working, so this should be no problem.
Using Gnome Commander, though, I got an "access denied" type of message. I assumed without actually checking that it must be a permissions thing, so I decided to fix it once and for all by running
Code:
sudo chmod -R 755 /mnt
This took several minutes to run, and apparently did its job. I didn't check every file, but it seemed to have worked.
But I still couldn't copy the file in Gnome Commander. So I thought some more, and realized that all the files on all of my drives in /mnt were owned by root, so really I hadn't given myself any permissions at all. What followed next was about an hour of futzing around with chown and chgrp commands, trying to either make myself the owner of everything except / and /usr, or at least put myself in a group associated with all the data drives.
At the end of that frustrating hour, I began to suspect that sudo was no longer working. It seemed that no matter what command I followed sudo with, nothing would happen. Nothing. It would just prompt me for the next command, as if it had completed with no problems -- even when I typed something like
Code:
sudo chown jim this_file_does_not_exist.whatever
it would return no error message; just the next prompt.
The possibility that I had somehow deleted myself from /etc/sudoers would explain why I couldn't seem to get the simple syntax for chown right; maybe it had been right all along, but sudo was just pretending to work, while ignoring me the whole time.
So after realizing that I seemed to have lost all administrative control of my system (Ubuntu does not create a root account; if I was really gone from sudoers, I was screwed), I booted to a Knoppix live CD, and manually added myself /etc/sudoers (I was, in fact, not listed).
I rebooted, and everything seemed to be fine. sudo now worked, and though I still hadn't solved the "why can't I copy this stupid file" dilemma, I was very tired, and decided to give up for now.
It was then that I tried to start xmms, only to discover that (both of) my sound card(s) had been deleted from the driver list. When I last checked, I had two: AC 97 and Emu 1212. Now they were both gone. Logging out didn't help. Rebooting didn't help. Creating a new user with default settings didn't help. My sound card is gone.
WTF?
If you have read this far, and you live in NYC, you should let me know, because I clearly owe you a drink.
I know this whole thing sounds absurd, and maybe none of these problems are even related. All I know for sure is that everything was working fine until I putzed around with chown and chgrp for about an hour, and then somehow it all went to hell. It is worth noting that never once did I attempt to alter anything in / or /usr; I was testing exclusively on files and directories on mounted data drives that contain music and video and such.
Help?
--jim
