[vox-tech] Re: please help

[Peter Jay Salzman]

Mike called me.  His home directory was essentially empty [1].  I had him
read to me the contents of "mount".  Nothing was mounted on /home, as I
suspected.

I had him cat out /etc/fstab to learn the partition that /home resides on.
It was /dev/hda6.  I had him mount /dev/hda6 onto /home, and that seemed to
work.  He went into KDE and was able to access his homework.

The laptop has no floppy, but does have a flash card, so he has the means to
copy his homework to another computer and print it out.  So that takes care
of the immediate problem.

I told him to email me a copy of /var/log/dmesg and /var/log/messages, so
I'm waiting for that to try to figure out why this problem happened in the
first place.  I'll report back when I receive these files.

He also told me that his wireless network card doesn't work on the laptop.
He was under the impression that he needed to recompile the kernel to get it
working.  I told him that I seriously doubt a kernel recompile is necessary.
Turns out he hasn't been to a LUGOD meeting.  I told him that if he took his
laptop to the next LUGOD meeting, there would be 30 people falling over
themselves to help get his network card working.

Peter

[1] He actually created a temporary user while trying to figure out what was
happening.  Since /home wasn't mounted, the temp user's home directory is
located in /home (but is not in the /home partition, if you get my drift).
I didn't tell him to delete the directory because /home was already mounted
at that point, and I didn't want him to change anything until his homework
is safe and sound on another machine.


On Fri 11 Mar 05,  9:13 AM, Jonathan Stickel <jjstickel at sbcglobal.net> said:
> I just called Mike to see if I could help him quickly by phone.  It 
> seems like his home directory has disappeared, and he says a file system 
> check did not fix things.  This is probably outside the scope of my 
> expertise.  Is someone able to help him?
> 
> Jonathan
> 
> 
> Michael Siminitus wrote:
> >1- Michael Siminitus, [address, phone removed] – call anytime -ASAP 
> >please
> >
> >2- see full specs at: 
> >http://support.gateway.com/s/Mobile/Gateway/200ARC/3501609sp83.shtml
> >
> >2- Mandrake 10.
> >
> >3- I cannot log on, except as root or the new user I created. The error 
> >I keep getting is:
> >* There was an error setting up inter-process communications for KDE. 
> >The message returned by the system was:
> >Could not read network connection list.
> >//.DCOPserver_localhost_0
> >Please check that the “dcopserver” program is running
> >
> >4- sorry, it's on my laptop and I can't retype that whole thing.
> >
> >5- I have a paper trapped in the machine I need to turn in tomorrow. I 
> >don't know if it is possible, but it would be GREAT if I could bring the 
> >laptop to someone tomorrow morning who could help out.

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