I shut down my Ubuntu 10.04 (recently upgraded from 9.04 to 9.10 to 10.04) and moved it to another location with a different monitor, keyboard, mouse.

When I booted, a screen came up stating:

Whatzit?

Please use better thread titles to help get the attention you want. Your thread title should relate to the content of your post, giving a very brief summary of your issue.

I do not object to your re-titling my post, but I would have thought that "Foobar?" would be all that is necessary to attract the attention of someone who has some idea what it is. The thread is thoroughly explanatory.

Further to the issue, I tried M to manually recover. It went to the shell and said it was starting a recovery routine, then immediately reverted to the prompt with no feedback. I exited the shell and it went back to the warning message, so this time I pressed S to skip. It seemed to start normally.

I used Chrome for awhile and then attempted to start Firefox. Instead of starting, Firefox threw up a message:

I continued and it crashed and threw up a Mozilla Crash Reporter.

I tried to uninstall FF and reinstall but no improvement.

I restarted the computer again and again attempted to start FF with the same result. Then attempted to start Chrome but it would not start.

So re-started the computer again (beginning to sound like a Windoze problem?) and this time started Chrome which started normally. Made no further attempt to start FF as by now I know what is going to happen.

Do I reinstall 10.04, or what other action?

About the thread title.. When you created this thread, you were presented with the following text right beneath where you entered the title:
It's for good reason: a whole lot of folks who may know exactly how to help, won't even bother looking into your thread because (a) your title tells them nothing about the subject, and (b) they think that if you're too lazy to put a decent title, then the body of the post is probably no more concise. "Foobar?" can refer to a million things.

To your credit, yes you did a nice job presenting the problem though.

Anyhow, enough about the title! We've made out point.

So, did you happen to investigate the free space available on the disk, as the error message suggested? Browsers are a good example of programs that save a LOT of temporary stuff to disk when they are running; it may have filled the last available free space with cached images, webpages, etc., so has no room left to function.

If that's the case, you either need to delete a bunch of crap from /tmp (clean it out) and/or enlarge the partition where your OS is installed. Or one of possibly several other ideas, but these two come to my mind first.

Kind regards

Thank you for your patience. I am happy to be guided by your experience.

It is a 500Gb drive with most of the space unused. However, there was recently limited free space on the /home partition (approx 10% free). Upon investigation I found a 22 GB file that I had deposited there many months ago when I was trying to recover data from a NAS which went wheels up. Name of the file was something like My_500GB_MBR . I had to elevate to administrator to delete it because it said I did not have necessary permission. I am wondering if in fact it really was deleted?

Also, I am a refugee from Windows, and if I do say so, it is a whole lot easier in Windows to figure out what space there is, what is used, and what is free.

From memory, the /home partition is 40GB (but see below). My user /home shows 4.7GB used. Add this to the 22 and you have roughly 27. What is using the other 13 GB? Hidden files? That seems like a lot of hidden files for 4.7GB of user files!

Properties for the /home partition shows 9107 files using 4.7GB. Moving to my user /home directory shows 9105 files using 4.7GB. The only other directory in the /home directory, other than my user /home is a "Lost and Found" but properties simply says no information (i.e., "unknown")

Gparted shows that the /home partition is 37.25 GB, of which 26.89GB is used, with 10.36 free. This is very confusing to me because the file that I thought that I had deleted seems to be very much taking up space, or something is!

So what is the best way to determine exactly how much is in use and how much is free and by what?

P.S. The /tmp is 4.1 GB. Can the entire contents be deleted? All of the directories have today's date.

Maybe learning a little bit about the cli, but not sure if the following is any help. Any ideas?

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'vol_id --uuid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
# / was on /dev/sda6 during installation
UUID=5e10ad64-9374-4a36-9f70-d737180b96c2 / ext4 relatime,errors=remount-ro 0 1
# /home was on /dev/sda5 during installation
UUID=e3bf2e6c-105b-4269-a226-5b6efbb2c954 /home ext3 relatime 0 2
# swap was on /dev/sda2 during installation
UUID=198007bb-8765-4621-bbd3-fc71d40f8a8d none swap sw 0 0
/dev/scd1 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy0 auto rw,user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0
/dev/sdb1 /mnt/foobar auto defaults 0 0
/dev/sdb1 /mnt/foobar auto defaults 0 0
/dev/sdb /mnt/foobar auto defaults 0 0
/dev/sdb /mnt/foobar auto defaults 0 0
robert@Ubunutu:~$

Something you/we may find helpful is:
That shows all the mounted partitions, and how full they are.

Next:
So that for example, shows disk usage by subdirectory (subdirs of /home/sasha in this case), and sorts & shows the 10 largest directories. Navigate into the largest one or two, and do it again for the folders in there. You get the idea -- the goal is kind of an easter-egg hunt, except you're looking for that gigantic file you believe may be there instead. And when doing `ls` on the directories to see all the files there, remember to do it like:
so that gives a long listing, and includes hidden files.

You can also locate files by size, in an easier way, with a more complex `find` command, which I'll get into maybe later if you need it, and when I have a moment to put it together. Also you could use `find` if you happen to know the name of the offending giant file.

I'll check back in a while and see what's happening. Good luck & kind regards.

Oh, and as for /tmp, it is *usually* safe to delete it's contents just before shutting down or rebooting, or perhaps while booting up, but I tend to do it during shutdown. You could have an entry in your local system shutdown file, or have an init operation which runs for runlevel 0 or 6, which empties /tmp just before poweroff. Depending how you do this varies, depending on your distro. With Ubuntu, I am not sure what would be the best way since I am not an avid Ubuntu user. Someone else can perhaps advise on a way to conveniently clean /tmp on Ubuntu, or just Google or search LQ a little more and you should be able to find many similar threads about cleaning /tmp, and about full disks, which will have further ideas.

Do not clean /tmp while you are actually using the machine! You'll likely crash it.

There - that should show you the 10 largest files in the path (in this case, the /home directory and subdirectories.)

GrapefruitGirl, Sincere thanks for these. I have spent the afternoon playing around with the code, although I am afraid that at my level of experience, I did not make much progress towards a solution. I have copied all of this into a text file and intend to massage it some more and learn.

Wanting to get on with this, I reinstalled 10.04 in a new partition. It boots up well now with no error messages, but because (I guess) I installed to a new partition, I somehow did not wind up with it finding my existing /home partition.

I think it might be possible to mount the old /home so that the new install will automatically mount it each time it boots, but I have no idea how.

Would it be easier to reinstall and tick the right boxes so that the new install knows to look for the existing /home, and if so, how to do this?

Thanks.

Since you have already done a new install, it would be simplest of all options, I believe, if you repeat the new install yet again (unfortunately) and indicate the correct partition for your /home when it asks. It's a bit of a waste of time, but it may be faster than me trying to help you fix it, and less risky.

I can't instruct you about what check-boxes the installer will offer, as I haven't installed an Ubuntu in over 3 years. Fixing this is generally very easy. If you were using Slackware, I'd have good instructions. On Ubuntu, who knows.. Not me - they do some things differently.

Now, there are stacks of folks here who use Ubuntu, and have the knowledge/experience to guide you on the easiest way to doing your /home partition fix manually, so you could wait for someone to help you with that; or, re-install. If you want, create a new thread for the subject of "How to indicate my existing /home partition when installing Ubuntu?"; create it in the Ubuntu forum or the Newbie forum, describe the situation, and you'll hopefully get some help sooner than later.

Kind regards, & good luck with this!

GG, I am very appreciative of your good counsel. Will do.

It seems like you could suppress the pesky boot message by commenting out the corresponding line of /etc/fstab. Did I miss that above?

Thread is 5 years old, doubt it's still an issue.