Partitions switched on me

[aretudeetu]

My partitions changed after re-installation from /data and /var to /media/#BunchOfNumbers-1 and media/#BunchOfNumbers-2 respectively.

But this is much more involved.

I decided to do some server and development testing on my laptop behind a NAT router on my Lubuntu OS. I downloaded firestarter (probably unnecessarily). I also began changing file permissions and ended up crapping my whole /usr file permissions when I did:

chown user:user /*
chown -R user:user /*

So when I began doing sudo commands, they didn't work. Something like not proper 'pid'.
And when I tried without sudo, i needed permissions.

So I found instructions online to use my live CD (My Lubuntu cd in my case) and do the following commands:

sudo mkdir /mnt/ubuntu
sudo mount /dev/sda8 /mnt/ubuntu
sudo chown -R root /mnt/ubuntu/usr
sudo umount /mnt/ubuntu

Then I rebooted Lubuntu without the live cd.
Didn't work. I tried these also but can't remember if I did before or after the previous commands:

chown root:root /usr/bin/sudo

then

chmod 4755 /usr/bin/sudo

But getting permission denied or not proper pid.

So I just decided to reinstall Lubuntu. This is where things got wierd.
Here's setup before reinstalling attempt:

/dev/sda1: fat 16 ------------ 15 gigs
/dev/sda2: extension
/dev/sda5: swap -------------  3 gigs
/dev/sda6: /data ------------ 100 gigs
/dev/sda7: /var --------------- 20 gigs
/dev/sda8: / [lubuntu] ------- 20 gigs
freespace

During install, I deleted /dev/sda8 and re-installed lubuntu without importing settings.

Result was that in the "new" Lubuntu the mouse was frozen. And keyboarding to the folders I learned that my /data directory switched to /media/#BunchOfNumbers#, and so did my /var; Both with their correct gigabytes.

However, I found my /data directory was still there, but empty. And the /var/www was no longer there.

In system profiler I found that the only partition showing, contrary to before (before this mess started) was the /dev/sda8 root mount point.

So I tried re-installing Lubuntu again.

This time the mouse works, same directory setup as the last, but networking is disabled and would not work.

Also, some of my files (excluding /data and /var) were there from before all this began as if I never re-installed.

So I installed a linux mint 9 (fluxbox) next to Lubuntu.

In Mint's grub this is what I found.

Linux Mint 9, 2.6.32-22-generic - - /dev/sda9
Linux Mint 9 Recovery
Memory test
Memory Test serial console 115200
Ubuntu [Lubuntu] 2.5.32-25 - - /dev/sda8 - - (1st re-install)
" " Recovery
Ubuntu [Lubuntu] 2.5.32-21 - - /dev/sda8 - - (2nd re-install)
" " Recovery

So both the re-installs of Lubuntu didn't delete each other.

In Mint's disk utility, just one partition is showing for /dev/sda8 at 20gb which contain both of the Lubuntu installations.

In Lubuntu, the 2 /media partitions don't show up in disk utility. However, in Mint they do.

My question to get me started is why did the partitions move to /media?

If this is permanent, it might be OK as long as they are safe and I can just change my data to /media/data. But having my var files in /media seems kind of pointless.

If the first question doesn't answer this already, how do I keep a /var partition?

[reed9]

The bunch of numbers presumably means it's being identified by the UUID. This is something you can easily change in /etc/fstab.

My guess as to why it's under /media is that you didn't set a mount point for the affected partitions during your re-installation process. So the partitions were detected and mounted as any other temporary/removable disk, ie, a mount point was dynamically created under /media.

Regardless of why exactly, again, this is something you would change in /etc/fstab.

[aretudeetu]

Thanks for the links.