Somehow, after doing the update from 3.11.6-4 to 3.11.10-7, my OpenSUSE system has been badly corrupted. I did the system update yesterday, as I have been doing for months, and all appeared normal last night until I turned the computer off. Today, when I booted into OpenSUSE, the first sign that something was wrong was after I entered my password. For several minutes, nothing happened, then a bunch of text appeared on the screen for each of the services that had been started (bluetooth, CUPS printer service, etc.). After nothing happened for several more minutes, I hard rebooted the system and then received a message that there was no Grub2 menu. I turned off completely, booted into BIOS and tried again. This time I got the Grub menu and booted into Win7 to make sure that was ok…no problems there. I then rebooted and tried to get into OpenSUSE (3.11.10-7 is the first listed). This time, the KDE desktop started, but a variety of strange behaviors confronted me: for example, if I select the kickoff menu, some icons are visible, but most are missing. I can run nothing from the kickoff menu, not even a terminal window. None of the icons on the desktop will start an application. Dolphin, which was open previously and thus had restarted, gave me a bunch of errors about not finding the filesystem (sorry, but did not write these errors down, but in short, no drives could be viewed from Dolphin). The system monitor appears to be working and shows system activity, but the desktop is mostly non-responsive. I used Alt-f2, but nothing will start from there either. I could not even shut the system down from the desktop - had to force it from the power button.
I tried the recovery mode for 3.11.10-7 and tried booting into 3.11.6-4 - in both cases, the behavior of the desktop is similarly broken.
I really have no idea how to proceed. SUSE has been rock-solid since I installed a few months ago, and I was just saying last night how great it was (clearly cursed it…). Any advice about how to debug this would be appreciated. I realize I will probably have to reinstall, but hope to avoid a repeat of this mess.
This time, the KDE desktop started, but a variety of strange behaviors confronted me: for example, if I select the kickoff menu, some icons are visible, but most are missing. I can run nothing from the kickoff menu, not even a terminal window. None of the icons on the desktop will start an application. Dolphin, which was open previously and thus had restarted, gave me a bunch of errors about not finding the filesystem (sorry, but did not write these errors down, but in short, no drives could be viewed from Dolphin). The system monitor appears to be working and shows system activity, but the desktop is mostly non-responsive. I used Alt-f2, but nothing will start from there either. I could not even shut the system down from the desktop - had to force it from the power button.
You might try returning KDE to default by removing or backing up ~/.kde4. Then restart KDE, and see if that helps. Alternatively, create a new user, and examine whether the desktop behaviour is normal from the new user account.
I can only guess, from the little information. You probably did a large update which updated KDE as well as the kernel.
It is possible that you ran out of disk space, and the update got mangled. That’s the reason for the check of “df” output. You are looking to see if either the “/” file system or the “/boot” file system (if separate) is close to full.
These are good ideas I would love to try; however, as I cannot get to a terminal window, I don’t know how to do any of that. I tried a variety of the boot options from the login screen, but no success. I also tried ctrl-alt-f2 from the crippled KDE desktop, but whatever I type in at the login: prompt just disappears and the screen refreshes to the empty prompt.
I’m not sure if I’m doing something wrong or if the system is so hosed I can’t even get a bash shell to run. Somehow, I need to get into the shell before the problems start.
That’s correct. I enter my username and hit enter, expecting that I will then be prompted for the password. Instead, the screen just refreshes and I get the 'Welcome to openSUSE 3.11.10-7 (Bottle) etc." and prompt for the system login is back.
I should state that I don’t know if this was really an issue of going from 3.11.6-4 to 10-7, as I don’t know when that particular update was done. It had been a few days since I had logged into SUSE, and there were quite a few updates required last night, but I did not look at all of them - just let the system do its thing.
Regarding partition sizes, there are 3 linux partitions, one is 2gb, one is 20gb, and the last is 80+gb.
Ok, I went through the above process. When I hit F10, it first takes me to the geeko-on-a-branch image for several minutes, then the screen goes black. I have waited for over 5 minutes on the black screen, and still no prompt, so I am assuming something is seriously borked. This is a pretty fast Corei7 machine with 8gb of ram and SSDs, so I doubt anything would take this long to load.
I was just about to try the same thing with the earlier version and the recovery mode. Will report back.
Yes, it does seem completely clobbered. Yes, I believe the partitions I reported are swap, root, and home, respectively.
I had it so nicely setup and dialed in…but I guess I will just learn more by doing it all again. I’m just baffled as to why this happened. There were no warning signs at all during the update, and until the next boot into SUSE, everything appeared normal. Would love to know what went wrong and why…
I had it so nicely setup and dialed in…but I guess I will just learn more by doing it all again. I’m just baffled as to why this happened. There were no warning signs at all during the update, and until the next boot into SUSE, everything appeared normal. Would love to know what went wrong and why…
If /home is a separate partition, then reinstalling options allow you to keep the existing partition (so all your settings will be preserved), and only /will be reformatted. Of course, it may be necessary to reinstall required applications again (and Packman multimedia packages).
Yes, confirmed that all the both recovery options boot to non-functional desktops. Using run-level 3 option in grub just generates a black screen and no prompt.
Can you suggest the best approach to re-install just the root partition?
First, I’m going to boot into Knoppix from the DVD and see if I can find anything wrong with the SSD that SUSE is installed to.
I checked the partitions by running some tools in Knoppix. Neither root nor home are even close to being full. Checks of the SSD return no errors at all.
Still left scratching my head as to what went catastrophically wrong with my openSUSE update after being so solid and reliable for months…
When you install from DVD, the installer should detect existing partitions and provide opportunity to keep /home. (Examine the proposal carefully, and modify partition scheme if necessary)
In the partitioning section, click “Import partitioning”. It should accept the current partitioning and only reformat the root partition. This assumes install with the DVD image.
Again, assuming the DVD, there’s an option to use online repos during the install. That only works with a wired connection. If possible, enable the main repo and the main update repo. That way, your install will get the updates as part of the install.
Thanks very much for all the help and suggestions - great community here.
I do intend to burn a DVD this time (used a USB stick for the initial install). Also, I have a wired connection, so that does make some things easier.
Also, I was planning to use Knoppix to back up all the /root files to a CD, thinking that maybe I could recover some settings from those files after I re-install. If I knew what I was looking for, I could potentially find what is corrupted - all the files are there, but one or more of them are obviously clobbered.
Is there any way to re-title this thread, because it is obviously much deeper than just a problem with KDE?
Would it be better to select “Update an Existing System” vs. “New Installation”? Would that allow me to retain more of my existing settings, or not sufficiently replace the broken system files?