Shoot me in the head.

I was trying to get the wireless working on the boy's laptop with the bc43 driver and the howto I was following said to
On reboot the machine booted fine but I am unable to log into the gui except in single user mode with starx. I know better but I didn't make copies of the files so I can't just put them back from a liveCD. When I loged in from root there was a message about hal not working right.

I am able to log into a shell from "init 2" as a normal user. Another thing I notice is that the mouse does not work.

How do I reinitialize the /etc/udev/rules.d folder?

I have read other post that said to delete files out of that folder and reboot, so it seams to be a normal thing.

I have tried /etc/init.d/udev restart but that was no help.

I am ready. Go ahead and explain to me how dumb that was.

That was *really* dumb :}

Now, what distro is the machine running?

If this is the first time this happened I would not consider you dumb - just reckless.

If this is your second time, yes you did a dumb thing.

Thanks for not being to hard on me.

Debian Lenny AMD64

We had some trouble getting Lenny to configure the network card. We had to download a new Lenny release critical netinstall with the updated pci info to get it to work.

I did try to reinstall with # aptitude reinstall udev but that was not successfull because the network card is not functioning.

Would we be better just reinstalling? The install is only 2 weeks old.

I took a look at my /etc/udev/rules.d directory. It contains these files:

/etc/udev/rules.d/024_hpmud.rules
/etc/udev/rules.d/025_libgphoto2.rules
/etc/udev/rules.d/025_logitechmouse.rules
/etc/udev/rules.d/45-hplip.rules
/etc/udev/rules.d/50-udev.rules
/etc/udev/rules.d/55-hpmud.rules
/etc/udev/rules.d/60-persistent-input.rules
/etc/udev/rules.d/60-persistent-storage.rules
/etc/udev/rules.d/60-persistent-storage-tape.rules
/etc/udev/rules.d/60-persistent-v4l.rules
/etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-cd.rules
/etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules
/etc/udev/rules.d/75-cd-aliases-generator.rules
/etc/udev/rules.d/75-persistent-net-generator.rules
/etc/udev/rules.d/80-drivers.rules
/etc/udev/rules.d/90-hal.rules
/etc/udev/rules.d/91-permissions.rules
/etc/udev/rules.d/95-late.rules
/etc/udev/rules.d/z60_alsa-utils.rules
/etc/udev/rules.d/z60_hdparm.rules
/etc/udev/rules.d/z60_libpisock9.rules
/etc/udev/rules.d/z60_libsane-extras.rules
/etc/udev/rules.d/z60_libsane.rules
/etc/udev/rules.d/z60_xserver-xorg-input-wacom.rules

The data in these files contain 180k of data. The data is fairly complicated configuration tables.

So I would say that you would be better off to reinstall than to try to recreate all of these files by hand.

----------------------
Steve Stites

I thought as much. I looked at that folder on my laptop and saw those files. That is why I tryed the reinstall thing.

I had hoped that there was a copy of the udev package in cache somewhere that I could extract the files out of. But I don't know where I would look for it. It is possible for me to download it to my laptop and extract the files to a cd. Would I then be able to put them back where they belong?

Thanks

I guess since the box is broken what more damage can i do, huh?

I downloaded the udev package to my laptop and and put it on a memory card and booted the boys laptop to Knoppix but Knoppix dosen't recognize the memory card.

The boy then booted to vista and copied the file to the windows partition. Later when he lets me have access to the box again I will reboot on Knoppix again and see if I can put the files back.

Thanks

I have made it a habit of using rcs to backup old configurations before making changes.
I'll create an RCS subdirectory and then run "sudo ci -l <configfile>" before making my changes.
You can add comments when checking explaining the changes.

You might want to check your cron jobs to see if it makes periodic backups of important config files in /etc/, or perhaps just after installation.

# ci
bash: ci: command not found

?

No need for knoppix if you can boot into single user mode.
At the grub screen highlight the kernel, press e, highlight the kernel line, add 1 to the end, press enter, press b.
See if you have the deb in /var/cache/apt/archives/udev_version_amd64.deb or some such. If not, use the deb you downloaded.
In some dir of choise do "dpkg -x /var/cache/apt/archives/udev_version_amd64.deb ."
Copy over the files from etc/udev/rules.d/ to /etc/udev/rules.d/

If that won't work and you have the deb:
"dpkg -r udev"
"dpkg -i /var/cache/apt/archives/udev_version_amd64.deb"
Obviously change the version to what you actually have there.

Thanks makuyl

I got the gui back this morning. I had to use a two step process, might not have if I had to if I had your instructions.

1 copy the udev package to a folder in the vista partition in vista because knoppix and the broken box, I deleted the files that let it see the memory card, won't access the memory card.

2 boot knoppix and put the files in the proper folder.

On reboot I was able to log into the gui. I did run # aptitude reinstall udev, which was successfull.

I still am not able to access the memory card or the wireless. Everything else seams to be working fine.

I am in the process of copying the file from my laptop to the boy's in the hope that it will fix those two problems. It is also running amd64 lenny. But it is a HP where the boy's is Acer. Not sure that will matter or not.

Once again Thanks to everyone for the help.

Just out of interest, which howto told you to delete rules.d/* ?
Plug in the memory card and do "dmesg" after it's settled. Post relevant output, or just output of "dmesg|tail -15" or so.
Post relevant output of "lspci -v" for the wireless.

Come to think of it, you might want to start a new thread for the wifi card.

If you're using the default kernel, you may need to upgrade the kernel and it may help with some of the issues.

I have the system back up and it is in the process of updating. I put most of the contents of /udev form my laptop on the boy's and that fixed the memory card porblem.

I still don't have the wireless working. It seams that the b43 driver does not support the bcm4312 very well and I could not get it to work. I installed nidiswrapper and I did not succeed there either.

Thanks for the pointers on getting access to a memory card to work makuyl.

I missread the howto. It said to delete all the rules in /etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-net.rules

I don't have that file or folder on any of my machines. I can't say if it was on this machine before I deleted the files.

At any rate it is just the wireless that is not working now and that didn't work before I was stupid.

Thanks to all.

You need to install the rcs package. It is light weight and not as complicated as cvs. This makes it ideal to backup different versions of config files.