Leap 15.2 Upgrade/Fresh Install Serious Problems (incl. Imported home and User, Home Folder Reset)!?

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Hello.

I have 2 problems, the second more pressing than the first, though both are important to upgrading any Leap version. I’ll just give a rundown on the events so far.

Of note: my /home is on a separate XFS partition of the same drive, and I ran updates and rebooted before attempting the upgrade.

I tried upgrading Leap from 15.1 to 15.2 via USB since all I have is Wifi atm (so ctrl+alt+f2 → root login → init 3 → zypper dup --download-in-advance is a fail due to losing Wifi in runlevel 3). So I disabled other repos in advance and upgraded Opensuse repos to 15.2.
During the install, it reached approximately 85 - 90% completion, and then started throwing read-only errors during the attempt to install xorg-x11-xvnc, and all packages afterwards. So at this point the upgrade was hosed.
I force-rebooted and selected to boot from the snapper snapshot I made prior to the upgrade. Great - it booted… except su snapper rollback resulted in an error to the effect of, “Couldn’t create snapshot ((error 30) - read-only filesystem)”. So snapper couldn’t make a backup copy of the current ro filesystem and, consequently, couldn’t set the current ro image to rw. Soo… I tried booting from the installation USB in recovery mode and mounting the partition as rw so I could check the /etc/fstab, but recieved “wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda2”. Looking it up, a Suse document recommended btrfs rescue zero-log, which succeeded only in destroying it further; so much so that the ro snapshots would not even mount.

Now…
I have reinstalled from the ground-up, preserving my home partition, in the following manner:

-During partitioning, I selected Advanced partitioning and selected:

  1. Reformat the btrfs system partition, set mount to /, enabled snapshots.
  2. Reformat the swap partition, mount as swap
  3. Do Not format home partition, mount as /home

-Then:
At user creation, I selected to import a user and selected my username that appeared below.

Installed, reboot, and… my home folder appears to be completely reset; everything - but the stock folders - is gone, and all of my wallpapers in /home/(myname)/.local/share/wallpapers are also missing.

So my questions are, most to least pressing:

  1. What happened to my user home folder?
  2. Can I get my files back?
  3. How to avoid this again (still preserving my home folder, but would like to not have to muck with fstab mounting after install, if possible)
  4. What could have caused the fs to suddenly go r/o during upgrade? (Afraid to upgrade at all in the future.)

Thanks.

2

Output from

ls -l /home
ls -n /home
tail /etc/passwd

may shed some light on what went wrong.

3

Until you show the results asked for by @mrmazda, nobody really knows, but here are my bets.

  1. If you really didn’t format the partition mounted at /home, the files are still there, maybe under a different folder or with permissions set to another user number.
  2. Yes, if bet #1. is true.
  3. That procedure usually works. Maybe it was not a good idea to copy a user from a known broken system partition; better to create a new user with the same name if that happens again.
  4. Likely you had a system btrfs partition too small or too filled up with snapshots before the upgrade, so you ran out of space during the last part of the upgrade and the system went ro in an attempt to avoid further damage.
    Then likely you did something wrong in your attempt to rescue the filesystem.
4

I suspect that, what’s happened is, during the reinstallation, Leap 15.2 has added a /home directory to the / Btrfs system partition.

To get out of that situation, you’ll need to boot the rescue system on the installation USB and take a look at the partitions on the disk(s).

  • If, there’s a /home directory on the Btrfs system partition, you’ll need to rename it before sorting out the fstab entries to get your existing XFS home partition mounted.