Can't log in to GUI after clone

I am having a problem logging into the GUI after I cloned this system from another drive.

System A and System B are essentially identical except for hostname, IP, and some nfs mappings. System B’s HD went bad. I bought a new drive of the same size, but Western Digital instead of Samsung. I used CloneZilla to copy all of System A’s drive to the new System B’s drive. I mounted the drive into System B, booted with a SUSE 11.4 Live CD, and edited fstab and menu.lst to reflect the ID of the new drive. Everything works well until it gets to the graphical log in screen. I can’t log in as either the user or root, however if I change the session type to “console”, I can log in just fine.

Does anyone have any suggestions on where to look?

Tron

Well, exactly how alike are they?

Since you can get to the terminal prompts, log in as root and type init 3 then a enter and then init 5. See what errors you get?

Hardware wise, they are identical except for the brand of hard drive.

I did the init 3 and init 5 commands and received no errors. It successfully entered each state.

But the GUI did not start when you did a init 5???

Did you try a failsafe boot?

After I did an init 5 the GUI log in screen came back up, but with the same results. It doesn’t act like a bad password, it seems to accept it, the screen goes black, and then it goes back to the log in screen again. I have seen this type of thing before on an old Debian system and it turned out that the /home partition was full. Not so in this case.

No, I haven’t tried a failsafe boot because I honestly don’t know exactly what one does.

Did you check to see if the /boot/grub/device.map needed editing also ?

I didn’t do that before, but in just checking it I don’t see anything out of the ordinary. If it were wrong, I would think that booting in the first place wouldn’t occur.

Also, failsafe produces the same results. I can log in from console but init 5 just brings up graphical log in and I can’t get past it.

Fair enough. Sometimes when cloning that also requires an edit, as it may have disk-by-id information.

Did you check the /var/log/messages and /var/log/boot.msg and /var/log/Xorg.0.log files to see if they can provide any clues ?

On 04/08/2011 05:06 PM, TronCarter wrote:
>
> I can’t log in as either the user or root

when you say “I can’t log in as either the user or root” does that mean
there are no blanks where you can type the user ID or “root”? [by the
way, logging into the GUI as root should not be done]

or does it mean you do type in the ID/Pass, hit enter then:
-you get an error (what?)
-the machine powers down?
-the screen shows “no contact” or something like that and powers down?
-the screen goes to a pure black/blank screen with no errors
-or just what happens? exactly.

> however if I change the session type to “console”, I can log in just fine.

you can log in as either user or root?
using the same ID/Pass as system A?

> Does anyone have any suggestions on where to look?

a typo in fstab/meun.lst edit is where i would begin…

on the other hand, if you log in and go to a blank screen, see here:
http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Configuring_graphics_cards


CAVEAT: http://is.gd/bpoMD [NNTP via openSUSE 11.3 + KDE4.5.5 +
Thunderbird3.1.8] Can you believe it? This guy Ralph wins $181 million
in the lottery last Wednesday, and then finds the love of his life just
2 days later. Talk about LUCK!

There are blanks where I can type in username and password, just like I would normally expect for a log in screen. I type the username and password. It doesn’t complain of an invalid password, the screen goes black for about 2 seconds and then it returns me to the green log in screen. There is no power down associated with this problem.

Yes

I don’t see anything right off the bat in /var/log/messages and /var/log/boot.msg and /var/log/Xorg.0.log to indicate a problem. In messages I see that the Network Adapters are not being configured, but I expected that. I also see that it still has the hostname of the “good” system, but since that one can’t actually be seen without network access, I would assume that isn’t the problem.

this is a pure guess, you need to configure your graphics card, see here:

http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Configuring_graphics_cards

why do i say that? because you have not yet configured the card, and it
needs to be because i think the symptom given on that page “either a
black screen upon reboot, or the wrong resolution being displayed on the
monitor” needs to be expanded to include LOTs of problems, like:
blinking monitor, scrambled display, user returned to log in, etc etc
etc etc…

backup info: http://tinyurl.com/37v9y7m


CAVEAT: http://is.gd/bpoMD [NNTP via openSUSE 11.3 + KDE4.5.5 +
Thunderbird3.1.8] Can you believe it? This guy Ralph wins $181 million
in the lottery last Wednesday, and then finds the love of his life just
2 days later. Talk about LUCK!

OK, I’m out of here for the weekend, but I will give it a try on Monday and report my results.

At first I thought that, but then I noted he notes failsafe does not work.

Fail safe uses the FBDEV driver and that should not need any configuring.

On 04/08/2011 10:36 PM, oldcpu wrote:
>
> At first I thought that, but then I noted he notes failsafe does not
> work.

ah! ok…but, i know i have seen this problem:
-log in on green screen (user or root)
-ID/pass accepted
-then black/blank/(sometimes white?) screen
-but, green log in screen presented again in seconds

if graphics was not the reason for X failing in that way, what was it?
(i don’t remember, and my searchFU fails me)


CAVEAT: http://is.gd/bpoMD [NNTP via openSUSE 11.3 + KDE4.5.5 +
Thunderbird3.1.8] Can you believe it? This guy Ralph wins $181 million
in the lottery last Wednesday, and then finds the love of his life just
2 days later. Talk about LUCK!

The only thing I could think of was the cloning did not 100% clone.

This may happen if the file system is full. Don’t know why it would be in the case of a cloning unless the original was full which it may have been if there was a hardware problem that caused a lot of error messages. But maybe take a look at the the available space???

I ended up re-cloning the drive and instead of using the CloneZilla “Beginner” mode, I chose “Expert” and selected (in addition to the defaults) “-r Resize the Filesystem to fit partition size of target partition”. Even though according to Yast, both drives are identical in size, I thought perhaps there was a minute difference. Long story short, it worked after I did this. I don’t know if the -r option really made a difference or the previous attempt was just unsuccessful. Either way it works now. Thank you everyone for your help.

hmm Clonezilla may not clone the unused parts of the file system by default. So even if the partition is X bytes the files system would be Y bytes where Y<X Looks like that may be a gotcha in CloneZilla.

According to df on both systems, the partitions are the same size. There is also another option in clonezilla that appears to be a sector by sector copy, but I didn’t use it.