Hi,

My machine has a severe problem. Equipment: Ubuntu Gutsy (7.10), Compac Presario 5000, AMD Athlon, 256 mb memory. Older machine that has been stable.

I installed ntfg-3 which without a problem. An external drive was attached, and it mounted automatically.

The drive was not ejectable, so I attempted to add myself to the group fuse. Program stated fuse group has mounting ability. I started to add myself by using the user command under System>Admin>Users. Process hung at this point, so after about 5 minutes I forced a quit for the process.

When looking at the System > Admin > Users command, about half of the normal entries under Administration are gone. So I decided to look in the syslog for errors. Icons appear with a small "x" in them indicating there is no application associated. Also, no sound is available (icon at top states No volume control GStreamer plugins and/or devices found).

Cannot use sudo nautilus to open a root level browser, asks for password but ignores me, returning me to normal user instead of opening a root browser copy.

Some type of damage looks like it has occurred. I have a partimage for / from a few days a ago so I could just restore.

QUESTIONS:

How to copy var/log of drive so I can go back later and review? Copy and paste has permission problems.

Is this problem worthing attempting to repair?
Is it something that a beginner could attemt?
Would the install of ntfg-3 cause this problem?

Thanks for any input,

mg92865

It sounds like the file /etc/group and maybe also /etc/passwd are corrupt. I'd try to open your backup image or a standard Ubuntu installation or LiveCD and copying the files /etc/group and /etc/passwd to your system, replacing your old files. Be sure to first save a backup of the old files somewhere. You can then add all the modifications you've made to your old files to your new files, so that the system still recognizes you.

As for backing /var/log up, you can just boot any LiveCD, mount your hard drive, and copy the files from var/log of your hard drive wherever you want. Like this you can also check out the files /etc/group and /etc/passwd to see if they look ok.

Lepakko,

Thanks for the comments. What ever happened has prevented me from opening any of the logs, ie there was no application which would open them. So I took the position that a complete restore was the way to go.

An image from eight days was written back to the disk. Machine boots again with all of the problems fixed.

I will use my notes to add any apps that were added in the eight day window. Thank you for your suggestions.

mg92865