MX-17 won't boot up anymore. [solved]

[GuiGuy]

In #18 above (reporting on his fstab)

sda1 is missing. sda3 which is an external backup drive and sda2 swap is there.

so it looks though his drive is messed up.
IMO he needs to get a live USB and use it to debug his system.

P.S. How can sda3 be an external drive? Typo for sdb(c)3?

[dolphin_oracle]

In #18 above (reporting on his fstab)

sda1 is missing. sda3 which is an external backup drive and sda2 swap is there.

so it looks though his drive is messed up.
IMO he needs to get a live USB and use it to debug his system.

P.S. How can sda3 be an external drive? Typo for sdb(c)3?

good catch GG I missed that.

still, whatever is on sda1 doesn't *have* to be present in the fstab, although we should see a root / partition definition and a swap partition I think.

now that Mauser at least has a basic root Xfce session, perhaps creating a new user will allow him to post some info more easily.

[GuiGuy]

........
now that Mauser at least has a basic root Xfce session, perhaps creating a new user will allow him to post some info more easily.

I wonder whether he will be able to create a new user by CLI : could you post how to do it?
(He has no panel and right-click commands are not working).

[dolphin_oracle]

........
now that Mauser at least has a basic root Xfce session, perhaps creating a new user will allow him to post some info more easily.

I wonder whether he will be able to create a new user by CLI : could you post how to do it?
(He has no panel and right-click commands are not working).

I believe the command is useradd , which should pull the default configuration from /etc/skel.

[GuiGuy]

useradd -m USERNAME

works for me: you then have to do

passwd USERNAME

But I don't know whether it will work on Mauser's broken system .

[Mauser]

the place where you log in as root can also be used to log in as user. assuming your user account is working.

No, because it won't let me into my user account. I reformatted the hdd and re-install MX17 and this time I didn't encrypt it. I have seen this encryption issue on another Linux distro to other people which I can't say which one and how that went because it would violate forum rules. On a positive note, the MX community handled this encryption issue in a nice professional manner. Thank you all for your efforts.

[Mauser]

Of course, there is the mystery as to why this happened in the first place.

There was the mention of the recent change of swappiness from 60 to 10. Maybe this had some unforeseen interaction with encryption when the swap somehow was used this last time. The other possibilities may be a flaky hard drive or some sort of power fluctuation that caused a disk error, even just a fluke cosmic ray that flipped a critical bit.

It booted fine about a half a dozen times after that swappiness change. I guess we have to see if it happens to anyone else.

[Mauser]

In #18 above (reporting on his fstab)

sda1 is missing. sda3 which is an external backup drive and sda2 swap is there.

so it looks though his drive is messed up.
IMO he needs to get a live USB and use it to debug his system.

P.S. How can sda3 be an external drive? Typo for sdb(c)3?

That's a typo from my Stupidphone. There is nothing like a real key board.

[Stevo]

the place where you log in as root can also be used to log in as user. assuming your user account is working.

No, because it won't let me into my user account. I reformatted the hdd and re-install MX17 and this time I didn't encrypt it. I have seen this encryption issue on another Linux distro to other people which I can't say which one and how that went because it would violate forum rules. On a positive note, the MX community handled this encryption issue in a nice professional manner. Thank you all for your efforts.

You can certainly tell the tale of how it went on any other distro as long as you don't go nuts and start cursing...

There's plenty of situations that seemed to work fine until conditions were right for them to fail. A classic example is the Challenger space shuttle disaster, though plenty of people were aware of the O-ring problem beforehand.

[Mauser]

the place where you log in as root can also be used to log in as user. assuming your user account is working.

No, because it won't let me into my user account. I reformatted the hdd and re-install MX17 and this time I didn't encrypt it. I have seen this encryption issue on another Linux distro to other people which I can't say which one and how that went because it would violate forum rules. On a positive note, the MX community handled this encryption issue in a nice professional manner. Thank you all for your efforts.

You can certainly tell the tale of how it went on any other distro as long as you don't go nuts and start cursing...

There's plenty of situations that seemed to work fine until conditions were right for them to fail. A classic example is the Challenger space shuttle disaster, though plenty of people were aware of the O-ring problem beforehand.

I can't tell the tale because I was warned before about it by one of the moderators.