10.10 New install: lost Home; how to recover?

[XEtedBear]

I have just installed 10.10 to dual boot with Win XP. This requires some contortions on my ASUS A8V based system. The system installed and ran well in a 'contorted' hardware config (more on this later), but once I reconfigure to the 'normal' state, boot of Ubuntu pauses with the message " The disk drive for /home is not ready yet or not present. Continue to wait or Press S or M" (my precis).

None of the options, nor using recovery mode, can find /home. How do I recover?


The contortions I have to go through to install relate to the fact that on this ASUS A8V motherboard it is not possible to boot from my SATA attached CD/DVD drive. To install either windows or Ubuntu I have to use a borrowed IDE CDROM, which I connected as a slave drive on the Primary IDE channel.

The install configuration looks like this:
Primary IDE Master = 60 GB drive, contains GRUB and a WinXP install.

Primary IDE SLave = ATAPI CDROM

Secondary IDE Master = 80 GB drive with following partitions:
1. 4 GB NTFS paging area for Win XP
2. 15 GB EXT4 for Ubuntu /
3 3 GB SWAP area
4. 50+ GB EXT4 for /home

Secondary IDE Slave = not installed.

SATA-1 = CD/DVD drive (not bootable)

This config works OK - except for the system which donated the ATAPI CDROM! and the fact that this drive has to sit on a cardboard box next to the open case, because there isn't room (or cable length) to install it in the case. Clearly that config. cannot be used long-term

But when I remove the ATAPI CDROM drive, Ubuntu cannot boot.

What's the recovery method?

[Tynach]

I had this problem as well, and eventually opted to use LVM to just combine my /home and / partitions into one (they were two separate drives).

However, I did find a solution to your problem. I think there's one of those options (can't remember details) that allows you to drop to a recovery console... And then will allow you to continue booting after you're done. You can use the 'mount' command to manually mount /home just fine, then continue booting, and it will work without problems.

If your /home directory is, say, sda4, then you can do this:

sudo mount /dev/sda4 /home

And then press "Ctrl+D" or whatever it says, and continue booting just fine.

Edit: I think it actually allowed me to skip it, then I did the Ctrl+Alt+F4 or whatever to get to a TTY. I then mounted /home using that, exited, Ctrl+Alt+F7/F8 to get back to the GUI login, and logged in normally.

You could probably put it into /etc/fstab too. I don't know details about that.

[Halfbrazilian]

Could you post your fstab?

[XEtedBear]

Thanks for this helpful guidance.

Could ask how I could find out which device /home is on? I don't remember what device I allocated it to. I guess I will have to run some sort of commnd because at present the boot process ends at a command prompt.

By the way I cannot figure out how to get to the GUI from this command prompt - is that what Ctrl+Alt+F7/F8 will do?

[XEtedBear]

Could you post your fstab?

Certainly - if you could tell me where I find it when I am at a command prompt.

[garvinrick4]

Certainly - if you could tell me where I find it when I am at a command prompt.

gedit /etc/fstab

[XEtedBear]

gedit /etc/fstab


Thanks - I can understand that. The result is:

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid -o value -s 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 nodev,noexec,nosuid 0 0
# / was on /dev/sdc5 during installation
UUID=af7c1497-82d4-47a0-82b0-44ab76450b4f / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1
/dev/sdc7 /home ext3 defaults 0 2
# swap was on /dev/sdc6 during installation
UUID=b20e987e-0947-4c48-a23e-5c299655c653 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy0 auto rw,user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0

[XEtedBear]

If your /home directory is, say, sda4, then you can do this:

sudo mount /dev/sda4 /home

And then press "Ctrl+D" or whatever it says, and continue booting just fine.

Edit: I think it actually allowed me to skip it, then I did the Ctrl+Alt+F4 or whatever to get to a TTY. I then mounted /home using that, exited, Ctrl+Alt+F7/F8 to get back to the GUI login, and logged in normally.

You could probably put it into /etc/fstab too. I don't know details about that.

Thanks again for this. By looking at fstab using guidance from another post, I found where /home should be and successfully mounted it.

There is another issue however - for similar reasons it seems that Ubuntu cannot now find the installation DVD media - presumably because that was on a device which is no longer in my system. How do I find out what is the device name for my SATA-attached CD/DVD drive?

[XEtedBear]

...I think there's one of those options (can't remember details) that allows you to drop to a recovery console... And then will allow you to continue booting after you're done. You can use the 'mount' command to manually mount /home just fine, then continue booting, and it will work without problems.

If your /home directory is, say, sda4, then you can do this:

sudo mount /dev/sda4 /home

And then press "Ctrl+D" or whatever it says, and continue booting just fine.




Hmmm, it's not as straightforward as it first appeared: it seems that I have to employ this method every time I restart Ubuntu. While that's not beyond me, it certainly is something I would prefer to avoid.

Is there a more permanent 'fix', do you think?

[XEtedBear]

Correction (31/10/10): I have now understood how to place a suitable entry into /etc/fstab

No further action necessary.



Apologies for raising this again, but I would appreciate some further advice:

At present my system requires a manual mount for /home ("sudo mount /dev/sdb7 /home") on about 50% of the times I start or restart it. This is a bit of a time waster. How can I avoid this?