Foobar?

[Odyssey]

I shut down my Ubuntu 10.04 (recently upgraded from 9.04 to 9.10 to 10.04) and moved it to another location with a different monitor, keyboard, mouse.

When I booted, a screen came up stating:

The disk drive for /mnt/foobar is not ready yet or not present.
Continue to wait; or press S to skip mounting or M for manual recovery

Whatzit?

[oz]

Just guessing here, but if it was working fine after all the upgrades and before the move, it sounds like a cable or connector might have worked itself loose during the move. A different monitor, keyboard, or mouse shouldn't keep the hard drive from being found. If all components are properly seated and connected, I'd try resetting the BIOS to the defaults and reboot to see if it can find the hard drive.

[Odyssey]

All hardware well seated and cables secure.

I tried M to manually recover. It went to the shell and said it was starting a recovery routine, then immediately reverted to the prompt with no feedback. I exited the shell and it went back to the warning message, so this time I pressed S to skip. It seemed to start normally.

I used Chrome for awhile and then attempted to start Firefox. Instead of starting, Firefox threw up a message:

Could not initialize the application's security component. The most likely cause is problems with files in your application's profile directory. Please check that this directory has no read/write restrictions and your hard disk is not full or close to full. It is recommended that you exit the application and fix the problem. If you continue to use this session, you might see incorrect application behaviour when accessing security features.

I continued and it crashed and threw up a Mozilla Crash Reporter.

I tried to uninstall FF and reinstall but no improvement.

I restarted the computer again and again attempted to start FF with the same result. Then attempted to start Chrome but now it would not start

Re-started the computer again (beginning to sound like a Windoze problem?) and this time started Chrome which started normally. Made no further attempt to start FF as by now I know what is going to happen.

Anyone have any idea what is going on here? Do I reinstall 10.04, or what other action?

message: foobar is not ready yet or not present ?????

[Odyssey]

I'm having quite a conversation with myself here. Please feel free to join in and help me move this forward.

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'vol_id --uuid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
# / was on /dev/sda6 during installation
UUID=5e10ad64-9374-4a36-9f70-d737180b96c2 / ext4 relatime,errors=remount-ro 0 1
# /home was on /dev/sda5 during installation
UUID=e3bf2e6c-105b-4269-a226-5b6efbb2c954 /home ext3 relatime 0 2
# swap was on /dev/sda2 during installation
UUID=198007bb-8765-4621-bbd3-fc71d40f8a8d none swap sw 0 0
/dev/scd1 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy0 auto rw,user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0
/dev/sdb1 /mnt/foobar auto defaults 0 0
/dev/sdb1 /mnt/foobar auto defaults 0 0
/dev/sdb /mnt/foobar auto defaults 0 0
/dev/sdb /mnt/foobar auto defaults 0 0
robert@Ubunutu:~$

[Jonathan183]

I'm having quite a conversation with myself here. Please feel free to join in and help me move this forward.
...
#/dev/sdb1 /mnt/foobar auto defaults 0 0
#/dev/sdb1 /mnt/foobar auto defaults 0 0
#/dev/sdb /mnt/foobar auto defaults 0 0
#/dev/sdb /mnt/foobar auto defaults 0 0
robert@Ubunutu:~$

Comment out entries in /etc/fstab ... you are trying to mount /dev/sdb and /dev/sdb1 to the same folder ... also check output of df -h to see if you have problems with file systems being full.

[ladlers]

Perhaps you are having some type of hardware failure, such as your hard drive.

[Odyssey]

Wanting to get on with this, I reinstalled 10.04 in a new partition. It boots up well now with no error messages, but because (I guess) I installed to a new partition, I somehow did not wind up with it finding my existing /home partition.

I think it might be possible to mount the old /home so that the new install will automatically mount it each time it boots, but I have no idea how.

Would it be easier to reinstall and tick the right boxes so that the new install knows to look for the existing /home, and if so, how to do this?

Thanks.

[Jonathan183]

post output of

sudo blkid
mount

you should be able to edit fstab to mount the home partition without a re-install ...

Ed: you will need to add a line to /etc/fstab similar to the one you originally had

# /home was on /dev/sda5 during installation
UUID=e3bf2e6c-105b-4269-a226-5b6efbb2c954 /home           ext3    relatime        0       2

... assuming you did not wipe your home partition when you did the re-install.

[oz]

I shut down my Ubuntu 10.04 (recently upgraded from 9.04 to 9.10 to 10.04) and moved it to another location with a different monitor, keyboard, mouse.

When I booted, a screen came up stating:



Whatzit?

Just curious about something, Odyssey...

Is the same computer that you were working on in this earlier thread, and if so, are you sure the current condition of the computer has nothing at all to do with those prior efforts?

[Kloschüssel]

Wanting to get on with this, I reinstalled 10.04 in a new partition. It boots up well now with no error messages, but because (I guess) I installed to a new partition, I somehow did not wind up with it finding my existing /home partition.

I think it might be possible to mount the old /home so that the new install will automatically mount it each time it boots, but I have no idea how.

Would it be easier to reinstall and tick the right boxes so that the new install knows to look for the existing /home, and if so, how to do this?

Thanks.

#backup current home
mv /home /home.local
#create empty dir
mkdir /home

Edit fstab to contain a line like the above that mounts the home dir:

/dev/sdX /home ...

Try the mount in console:

mount /home

and if it works fine on next boot you're back home.