Hello,

My two year old got a hold of my mouse for quite a while this afternoon and did something inexplicable to my system. The first thing I noticed was that a torrent I was downloading that should be working fine (a legal one, I promise) would not download anymore. I checked all of my Deluge settings, and everything was as it should be, so I restarted the computer just to see what would happen. But now it will not boot up. It shows the Xubuntu screen and looks like it will boot up fine, and then it goes to a black screen and says something like

Starting anachronistic cron . . . OK
Stopping anachronistic cron . . . OK

And that's it. It just stays like that for a long time, and then the screen goes completely blank. Then nothing.

I tried running e2fsck from a live cd and it shows no problems, but still this keeps happening.

Can someone please help me? How can I figure out what happened and how to fix it?

Thank you!

Sorry, forgot to say that I'm on Xubuntu 11.10.

Without a time machine or a backup or an image of some kind you are kind of in a mess.

Guess you could try failsafe or look it it from a live cd boot. Maybe single user mode.

In the live cd you might look at /var/logs for more info.

It's fixed. He somehow managed to download an entire website full of youtube videos and I was out of disk space. I have no idea how he does some of the things he has done with this computer. I blame hotkeys!

Heh.

"It isn't easy being the parent of a six-year-old. However, it's a pretty small price to pay for having somebody around the house who understands computers." -- fortune

4 members found this post helpful.

It had to be something simple - unless you were silly enough to leave it unattended in super-user mode!
don't try the above at home

Certainly not! If I had done that, I have no doubt that my computer would have burst into flames.

I'm sure it was some simple set of clicks that I just do not know about. It's usually the keyboard he gets his hands on, and when he does that, he always manages to take a bunch of screenshots, and I have no idea what the keyboard shortcut for that is.

In regard to your super-user code, not that I would recommend it with a two-year-old in the house, but I found this interesting reading:

Myths - You will harm your system as root

It's probably not a good idea for newcomers (like me!), but it's interesting nonetheless.