I was playing a game with playonlinux that stopped responding. I couldn't click on anything so I did a hard reset. The Linux mint logo came up, then a black screen with just the mouse pointer was showing. I was able to open the terminal, but I don't really know what the problem is or how to fix it. I have searched the internet for various sokutions, but nothing seems to work. The first think I tried was sudo apt-get update. This seems to fail. It's shows a bunch of lines that start with err then lines with w: failed to fetch then lists various things. It almost seems like the update can't connect to the internet to update anything. Can anyone help me get my computer usable again?

Find out what's going on by doing:

tail -30 /var/log/messages

It says no such file or directory

Did you log in as root? If not do the same using sudo

sudo tail -30 /var/log/messages

I'm not logged in as root, but I did use sudo.

I don't think they removed /var/log/messages from Linuxmint but try

tail -30 /var/log/dmesg

Okay that came up with something. https://www.dropbox.com/s/dr1lkdhqqt...G0116.jpg?dl=0
I really appreciate your help. I have to go to bed now though, and will work on it again in the morning.

Apparently they changed its name to syslog just to be different


Anyway by the dmesg it might be that your hdd is not being mounted or something else is acting funny.

Try mount and see if your hard drive is being mounted.

sudo mount

then

tail -30 /var/log/syslog

tail -30 /var/log/dmesg

Do: sudo mount all

It says "mount: can't find all in /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab"

My best guess is that something may have deleted your fstab.

First try mounting your hard drive manually.

issue a: sudo blkid

Find main hard drive and select the root partition, then mount it at /mnt

example: sudo mount /dev/sda1

sudo mount /dev/sdX /mnt



If that works then, I would boot the machine using a live disc and rebuild the fstab.

It said that it was already mounted I think. The main hard drive would be ext4 correct? It wouldn't be swap and the third option is vfat. I also do not know what fstab is...

not sure how many devices you got connected to your box.

/etc/fstab is what tells your bootloader (grub2) where to mount your hdd.

It's a laptop with nothing special added. When I do sudo blkid, all of the options would show up right?