Cannot boot after upgrade to 8.10

[feedmecereal]

I just upgraded from 8.04 to 8.10 and I cannot boot. I get to the boot splash screen then it stops part of the way through and shows an error message. It pauses for a few minutes before displaying another error message:

Server Authorization directory (daemon/SErvAuthDir) is set to /var/lib/gdm but is not owned by user 108 and group 118. Please correct the ownership or GDM configuration and restart GDM.

Please help!! What do I do?

[ad_267]

I'm only guessing here, but you could try changing the group and owner of /var/lib/gdm. I'm not sure about that though, it might be that the ownership is correct but GDM is configured incorrectly.

Can you enter commands into the terminal? You might have to switch to another tty using Ctl-Alt-F1, you can switch back again with Ctrl-Alt-F7. Otherwise you can get a recovery login form the boot menu.

Can you check that the file /etc/gdm/gdm.conf has these lines:

User=gdm
Group=gdm

You can use "less /etc/gdm/gdm.conf" to view the file.

Then you can change the permissions with:

sudo chown gdm /var/lib/gdm
sudo chgrp gdm /var/lib/gdm

[feedmecereal]

I tried that and it didn't work.

After I restarted I wrote down some error messages that might help you figure this out:

Starting Kernel log daemon

It had some other stuff right after that but I didn't have time to write it down. But it did give this at the end:

start-stop-daemon: Unable to open pid file '/var/run/klogd/kmsgpipe.pid' for writing: Read-only file system

[ad_267]

How much work would it be to use the live cd to back up all of your data and then do a clean install? That's probably the easiest thing to do.

[feedmecereal]

That might be a whole lot more work than I would like to do because I have a lot of data on /home. I guess I should have repartitioned like I have read about.

Do you know what the problem might be?

[ad_267]

I'm not really sure but someone else might be able to help. It seems like the file permissions have been messed up somehow. The "read-only file system" message seems to indicate that root does not have permission to write to a file it needs to.

[wilshire]

i am having the same problem.

i've been using ubuntu since breezy, and *someday* i'd like to be able to upgrade it without it breaking.

my fstab:

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
# /dev/sda1
UUID=69d1535c-ded5-4b51-b73c-645887624b98 / ext3 relatime 0 1
# /dev/sda3
UUID=c95064c7-c2e8-486a-b2c3-51f99740ae30 /home ext3 relatime 0 2
# /dev/sda2
UUID=4ca9cea0-76e2-4da8-a72f-433efe0d55de none swap sw 0 0
/dev/scd0 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy0 auto rw,user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0
#usbfs
none /proc/bus/usb usbfs devgid=46,devmode=664 0 0

[wakebdr]

Same problem here too. I tried to upgrade from 8.04.

It looks like the whole filesystem is being mounted read-only, thus the errors we are seeing.

[feedmecereal]

Oh well, I just ended up reinstalling Ubuntu on another partition and then moving my old /home to my new installation.

[acearle]

I have the same problem, but found that if I boot using 2.6.24-21-generic instead of 2.6.17-7-generic it works.

Anyone have any ideas? I'm going to poke around a bit and see what I can find, but....ermmm....I'm a danger to myself and others editing conf files, lol!