[SOLVED] "Root" reclaimed my Partitions - files are missing!

[bab1]

I will still say that you have labled the partitions and the mount point is also of the same name ie: 80G. It is always good to name things distinctly. Another point to try is to manually unmount the drive with

umount dir device

and see what is in the directory.

[unutbu]

(1) In your /etc/fstab, change "auto.users" to "auto,users". (change period to comma). I think this might be why root has taken over your partitions. The users (and maybe the auto) options are not taking effect. Reboot (to test that the auto option takes effect). If things are not any better, please post the output of

mount

(2) If your /windows is mounting properly, ignore this. Otherwise, please post output of

blkid

Your /windows partion has a rather short UUID. I would have expected something longer.

(3) If your 80GB partition is still showing up as 20GB, run

sudo resize2fs /dev/sdb1

This should expand the ext3 filesystem on /dev/sdb1 to the size of the partition.

[cariboo]

You really should not have your partitions mounted in / they should be mounted in /media or the old skool way in /mnt. the reason behind that is that most file managers are set to look on media for your mounted partitions. I would unmount the drives, create the proper mount points:

/media/80G
/media/Bruce
/media/Lilo
/media/windows

One question though are /Bruce and /Lilo home directories? if so mount them in /home. If not mount them as in the above example.

Change /etc/fstab to reflect the proper mount points and remount your drives.

Jim

[bab1]

Jim,

I agree with you that the partitions should not all be mounted at /. That being said, you can mount them anywhere successfully. My samba directories are on a separate partition mounted under /smb. In addition (muddying the water a bit) I have another partition mounted at /smb/backup. Yes a mount on a mount! I can hear it now what happens if.... The answer is: Yes it crashes. But I want it to. No windows backups if there is no Samba share available. I have never had any problems with file managers.

I think the mount /media automagically shows up on the desktop. I popular enhancement (unless you have 5 or 6 of 'em).

[Bruce M.]

(1) In your /etc/fstab, change "auto.users" to "auto,users". (change period to comma). I think this might be why root has taken over your partitions. The users (and maybe the auto) options are not taking effect. Reboot (to test that the auto option takes effect). If things are not any better, please post the output of

That did it. DUH! A typo. How dumb.
They are back ... Thank you.

And I tell people I don't make typos, my keys move around to confuse me.

mount

(2) If your /windows is mounting properly, ignore this. Otherwise, please post output of

blkid

Your /windows partion has a rather short UUID. I would have expected something longer.

That /windows partition is empty, prepared incase I have to do a quick install as my ISP doesn't support Linux. In a year with Linux I have never needed it so I didn't waste time installing it. I have a SuperGurb disk in case I ever need to install it.

(3) If your 80GB partition is still showing up as 20GB, run

sudo resize2fs /dev/sdb1

This should expand the ext3 filesystem on /dev/sdb1 to the size of the partition.

With the replacing of "auto.user" to "auto,user" it is working fine.

One more question, is "realtime" putting these partitions in my / as folders, or is it because I gave them labels?

I want them back as /media/sdaX.

Someone said they still use "default" can I change:

realtime,auto,user

to

default,auto,user

Thanks kindly for you help.

A typo ... (hanging head in shame) ... sigh!
CHIMO!
Bruce

[Bruce M.]

You really should not have your partitions mounted in / they should be mounted in /media or the old skool way in /mnt. the reason behind that is that most file managers are set to look on media for your mounted partitions. I would unmount the drives, create the proper mount points:

/media/80G
/media/Bruce
/media/Lilo
/media/windows

One question though are /Bruce and /Lilo home directories? if so mount them in /home. If not mount them as in the above example.

Change /etc/fstab to reflect the proper mount points and remount your drives.

Jim

Hi Jim,

No they aren't home directories, just partitions for my wife and I to use for personal use.
I've changed the /etc/fstab and will be doing the remount stuff now and will reboot to see what happens.

X'ing fingers here.
CHIMO!
Bruce

[bab1]

As bodhi.zazen (forum staff) has stated:

Ubuntu now defaults to "relatime" in the options.

Anyways, use options :

relatime,auto,users

Let's use the Linux default.

[unutbu]

The relatime option means that the last time a file has been accessed is only written to disk if that time is earlier than the modification time. In short, this behavior causes your Linux kernel to write fewer times to disk, giving you snappier performance. (See http://lwn.net/Articles/244829/)

Each line in fstab (besides those that start with #) consists of 6 whitespace-separated fields. The second field defines the directory where the partition gets mounted.
So for example, the fstab line which reads

UUID=03140209-9a32-41a0-8cd4-fa833f435349 /Bruce          ext3    relatime,auto.users        0       2

mounts the partition with UUID=03140209-9a32-41a0-8cd4-fa833f435349 at /Bruce.

When fstab is in charge of mounting, the partition label has no effect on where the partition gets mounted. Only the second field matters.

When HAL is in charge of automounting hotswappable devices, HAL creates a directory in /media whose name coincides with the partition label. I'm not entirely clear on how fstab and HAL cooperate, but my experience has been that whenever there is an fstab entry, HAL does not try to automount. When there is no fstab entry, HAL tries to automount.

Since you already have fstab working and it doesn't sound like you need HAL's automounting feature, the easiest way to get your partitions mounted at /media/sdaX is to

sudo mkdir /media/sdaX

and then change the second field in fstab from /Bruce to /media/sdaX.

Someone said they still use default,auto,user...

According to https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Fstab,
defaults is short hand for rw, suid, dev, exec, auto, nouser, and async
(see below for the meaning of all these options).

Saying default,auto is redundant. "default,user" means the user option overrides "nouser".
That's fine. You can do "default,relatime,user" if you wish too.
According to https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Fstab, the relatime option is the default option for Hardy.

Here is a short summary of common options:

defaults        rw, suid, dev, exec, auto, nouser, async.
user            Permit any user to mount the filesystem. This automatically implies noexec, nosuid,nodev unless overridden.
ro 		Mount read-only.
rw 		Mount read-write.
auto         	The filesystem can be mounted automatically at bootup. This is really unnecessary as this is the default action of mount -a anyway.
noauto       	The filesystem will NOT be automatically mounted at startup, or when mount passed -a. You must explicitly mount the filesystem.
dev/nodev    	Interpret/Do not interpret character or block special devices on the file system.
exec/noexec     Permit/Prevent the execution of binaries from the filesystem.
suid/nosuid     Permit/Block the operation of suid, and sgid bits.
nouser          Only permit root to mount the filesystem. This is also a default setting.
sync/async   	All I/O to the file system should be done (a)synchronously.

[Bruce M.]

@ unutbu

WOW!!!!!!!!!! GREAT READ!! Thanks unutbu.

To continue ... for all who have helped.

Now to make things right. I got everything working thanks to the help here and would like to say:

Thank you all!

Then after I got it all fixed up, I had a .gvfs problem and something with SCIM popped up and wouldn't allow me to type properly in gedit. That ended up being the straw that broke the camels back.

I backed up my /home and reinstalled Xubuntu 8.04 today, and made things easier:

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
proc            /proc           proc    defaults        0       0
# /dev/sda2
UUID=c6866abf-2476-475a-96a4-0d6dc5804ddb /               ext3    relatime,errors=remount-ro 0       1
# /dev/sda1
UUID=E531-3CB1  /media/W2K            vfat    utf8,umask=007,gid=46 0       1
# /dev/sda3
UUID=16468fa0-2f49-4b96-b552-4a3ad834654a /home           ext3    relatime        0       2
# /dev/sdb2
UUID=bbc1fb95-5fa9-4638-9421-2fa13f4a2af2 /media/Data     ext3    relatime,auto,user        0       2
# /dev/sdb1
UUID=54f6405d-de40-4c38-ad04-993565e8d36a none            swap    sw              0       0
/dev/scd0       /media/cdrom0   udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0       0
/dev/scd1       /media/cdrom1   udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0       0
/dev/fd0        /media/floppy0  auto    rw,user,noauto,exec,utf8 0       0

As you can see, /, /home and /media/W2K are on the 200G HD and /media/Data and "swap" on the 80G HD.

Next I'm going to unmount (should have done that at Install Setup) the /media/W2K partition as it is "empty" and I'm hoping I can keep it that way. Maybe that's why the UUID is so short?

I'm Windows Free, no offense Bill, Windows served me well (?¿?) for many years, now I'm going to give Linux the same amount of run time.

Thank you everyone for all your help and input. I've learned a lot with these two threads.

CHIMO!
Bruce