Howdy, I was installing Audacity when I encountered a total lock-up failure. After reboot, the only thing that comes up is GNU GRUB (grub>) I tried to reinstall off of my original distro disks using the upgrade mode because I have gobs of files that I presently can not get to and I don't want to wipe the hard drive clean and start over loosing all my data. When I try to do the reinstall/upgrade I get an error message telling me that /usr/tmp is a directory and should be a symbolic link I should return it to the state of a symbolic link and restart the upgrade.
Any suggestions would greatly be appreciated..
I had to do something like this yesterday myself after screwing up grub on my Centos box. You need to resetup grub is all.
Boot into the system using the fedora cd/dvd.
At the prompt, type "linux text expert" or "linux rescue" (without quotes, of course). I prefer the former, btw, and the rest of my instructions are flavoured that way.
When you get to the installer screens, do what you would normally do until you get to the part where it asks which partitioner you want to use.
Ctrl-F2 gets you to the prompt. My root partition is hda3 and my boot is hda1.
% mkdir /target % fsck -f /dev/hda1 % fsck -f /dev/hda3
When this completes, it means that the two partitions are in the best state they are going to be (assuming no errors....)
% mount /dev/hda3 /target % mount /dev/hda1 /target/boot % chroot /target
% /sbin/grub --no-floppy
grub root (hd0,0) setup (hd0) quit
% exit % umount /target/boot % umount /target
then hit ctrl-alt-del, eject the disk, and that should work.
Hope that this helps! Steve
dan wrote:
Howdy, I was installing Audacity when I encountered a total lock-up failure. After reboot, the only thing that comes up is GNU GRUB (grub>) I tried to reinstall off of my original distro disks using the upgrade mode because I have gobs of files that I presently can not get to and I don't want to wipe the hard drive clean and start over loosing all my data. When I try to do the reinstall/upgrade I get an error message telling me that /usr/tmp is a directory and should be a symbolic link I should return it to the state of a symbolic link and restart the upgrade.
Any suggestions would greatly be appreciated..
On Sat, Dec 03, 2005 at 07:26:44PM -0600, dan wrote:
Howdy, I was installing Audacity when I encountered a total lock-up failure. After reboot, the only thing that comes up is GNU GRUB (grub>) I tried to reinstall off of my original distro disks using the upgrade mode because I have gobs of files that I presently can not get to and I don't want to wipe the hard drive clean and start over loosing all my data. When I try to do the reinstall/upgrade I get an error message telling me that /usr/tmp is a directory and should be a symbolic link I should return it to the state of a symbolic link and restart the upgrade.
Any suggestions would greatly be appreciated..
Steve Ringwald has a useful approach but I would do all this using linux rescue and in his solution he assumes that his boot partition is on its own partition. We have no evidence that is true on your system so take note of that is trying to do what he suggests.
But as too your original question /usr/tmp should be symbolically linked to /var/tmp.
Thanks for the info. As I'm still a relative tin horn with Linux, What are the commands to do the symbolic linking required if /usr/tmp should be symbolically linked to /var/tmp?
Thanks
akonstam@trinity.edu wrote:
On Sat, Dec 03, 2005 at 07:26:44PM -0600, dan wrote:
Howdy, I was installing Audacity when I encountered a total lock-up failure. After reboot, the only thing that comes up is GNU GRUB (grub>) I tried to reinstall off of my original distro disks using the upgrade mode because I have gobs of files that I presently can not get to and I don't want to wipe the hard drive clean and start over loosing all my data. When I try to do the reinstall/upgrade I get an error message telling me that /usr/tmp is a directory and should be a symbolic link I should return it to the state of a symbolic link and restart the upgrade.
Any suggestions would greatly be appreciated..
Steve Ringwald has a useful approach but I would do all this using linux rescue and in his solution he assumes that his boot partition is on its own partition. We have no evidence that is true on your system so take note of that is trying to do what he suggests.
But as too your original question /usr/tmp should be symbolically linked to /var/tmp.
dan wrote:
Thanks for the info. As I'm still a relative tin horn with Linux, What are the commands to do the symbolic linking required if /usr/tmp should be symbolically linked to /var/tmp?
Couple of pieces of advice here:
* You should have some way of making system backups anyway. If you have a CD or DVD writer, or a USB pen/disk, or something else on the local network, your first priority should be to get those important documents saved onto the backup medium!
To do this, you might want to get a bootable Linux CD. I understand that Knoppix / Gnoppix and the Ubuntu boot CD are very polished these days, and should help you back up your system.
* Check /usr/tmp is empty. If not, I'd move it to /usr/tmp2 and check it out later:
ls -a /usr/tmp mv /usr/tmp /usr/tmp2
Then create a symlink like this
ln -s ../var/tmp tmp
Hope this helps,
James.