Hello,

I had Mandrake 8.1 installed since a year on dual boot with windows XP. All was fine.

The other morning I use Gimp and it frose my computer. I reseted it and when I tried to go back into linux but it complained that a partition was not unmouted properly and my screen flickered sleep/awake when getting into X.

I posted the a question on another forum of LQ and got help. Looking at the doc I used e2fsck to repair the bad partition (/dev/hda8) although I got an advice that what I did was dangerous. After that I got no complaits anymore about unproper unmounting and the partition is visible when using "fdisk -l /dev/hda"

Now I get into the console mode fine but I cannot get into an X session. I typed XFdrake, I tried a resolution test, it didn't work complaining of "can't read lock file /tmp/.xf.lock" (I can't guarantee there are no typo here). Anyways, after that it asks me if it can switch the x session by default when booting and I answered yes. So now when I boot linux, I see the console mode again with "/etc/issue -> cannot execute binary file" writen on the login name.

Can anybody help me?

1) Did I do anything stupid with e2fsck?
2) Should I reinstall something instead of trying to repair it?
3) And can anybody tell me why I have to loose all that time and energy juste because Gimp froze my computer and I reseted it? What happened?
4) How can I reset my X sessions? XFdrake doesn't seem to do the job, even in "-- expert" mode.

Thanks in advance for any help.

ps: part of this message appears on the distro forum but I decided to put it here because it may be a more proper forum and also, I posted it as a following to my original problem which seems to be a bad idea judging from the amount of answers.

Delete all in /tmp and try again. It may be that one or two files were lost on reboot (e2fsck can't help with such case), probably with X settings. When you delete /tmp, X should start from the beginning.

I highly recommend an upgrade to ext3.

From what I understand, this took a while to fix because linux apps normally keep track of their status via lock files. Eg if the file exists there's an instance of the app running.
The trouble is when you suddenly kill the power the apps dont have a chance to delete the lock files etc, so next time your vital apps try to start they think there's another instance of them already running, and most will quit out as more than once instance will cause conflicts as they both try and use one system.
Deleting the temporary files should fix this.
An ext3 or ReiserFS partition has a small journal or list of previous file actions, which means in the event of a crash or power loss you can roll back some of the last file changes which often solves many problems.

Okay,

Thanks for the help but I will need more I'm afraid.

I'm not sure I understand (in fact I'm pretty sure of the rest). I know that whatever e2fsk did, it got rid of the flickering. The only problem remaining is that X doesn't work anymore.

I erased everything in the /tmp directory, even the files and directories starting with ".". I used XFdrake after that and it complained again, while "Starting X Font Server" was written on the top of my screen that it "can't read lock file /tmp/.X9-lock". I tried to make a phony file with "touch /tmp/.X9-lock" but I got the same message from XFdrake and after it fails the /tmp directory is empty.

I'm open to any help....

Thanks!

Try forcing the uninstall and reinstall of the XFree86 package without dealing with dependancies. This should just refresh and reset your X server setup, but I dont promise it'll fix things or not make it worse. Think of this as a plan B.

What package is X? I'm gonna try to uninstall and reinstall it on my laptop. I'm having trouble with it too. I installed it on another machine then moved the disk, so it's set up for hardware on anoter machine.

You moved the hard drive to different hardware? I suggest a full reinstall in that case.
Use the graphical uninstaller to search for the X package name, but the command line to force the removal and reinstall.

XFree is in a set of RPMS. Their names begin with XFree (there are also fonts among them, you don't need to reinstall them). The most important package is XFree86-server*

Problem: I have no CD-ROM drive in this system and my boot disks don't support my ethernet card. That's the only option I've found in this situation. Will try it again though. My floppy may be bad now though.