[AuckLUG] GDM problems ,but wait ,theres more :-)

[Banjo Donila]

More or less the /etc is not mounted or missing...   He previously mentioned that his root password is not working which more or less the /etc/passwd or /etc/shadow doesn't exists.  Also, the X conf files are not present.  If it was a hardware error, you should least be able to run it in the most primitive setup and an EE error in the logs will pop-up.

Post your syslog dmesg, boot.log, xorg.log's.  Check your fstab and mtab and tell us your fs schema when you're in single user mode...

To do this:

on grub hit E
go to kernel line and add number 1 at the very end of the line
hit b
hit b *i think this is the last one*

by the way do you see the fancy boot splash for FC ?

Nevyn <nevynh at gmail.com> wrote: > Hi again Nev,
>              I hope I have covered most of the points you raise in the
> following...
>
> On attempting to start in normal boot up mode , everything goes fine until
> udev then I get many many fail reports which flash past.We finally arrive
> a a large error box taking up 3/4 of the screen which says...
>
>   The GDM user 'gdm' does not exist.Please correct GDM
>   configuration and restart GDM.
>
> (By the way I can find no gdm.conf file on any computer running Fedora 5
> through 7) which is mentioned at...
>
> http://www.ibiblio.org/oswg/oswg-nightly/oswg/en_US.ISO_8859-1/articles/gdm-reference/gdm-reference/x135.html
>
> in the Gnome Display Manager Reference Manual.
>
> If I then do Alt-Ctrl-F1 I do get a shell ,it comes with the error message
>
> localhost login: Cannot open font file latarcyheb-sun16.
> If I then hit return I get a normal login prompt but it refuses to accept
> any root or user passwords.
>
> The ONLY way I can get a shell , let alone a gui is to use the Rescue disk.
> I then go to shell via the rescue disk,this at least has the advantage of
> giving me a working shell. There are no remarkable errors listed in dmesg.
>
> Xorglog.0. gives
> X10: fatal IO error 104 (Connection reset by peer) on x server
> ":0.0" after 0 requests (0 known processed) with 0 events remaining
>
> Nevens suggestion (# init 5) gets me init: /dev/initctl: Nosuch file or
> directory.
> I can sometimes get the normal Gnome gui with startx  after running
> /etc/init.d/xfs start but when I do the first thing I get is error message
>
> Power Manager
> This program cannot start until you start the dbus system service.
>
> (Cannot start even if I knew how , no command line.)
>
> The Desktop which usually has "My Home" folder icon says "Somebodies Home"
> (literally) ,I get a ramfs icon on desk top and terminals wont start because
> "terminal cannot launch child processes." The terminal comes up but its
> just blank.
>
> I am missing /var/run/dbus/system_bus_socket .If found this when I was
> trying to manually start dbus system service.
>
> i seem to be real stuck. For 2 pins I'd re-install but I really need some
> not yet backed up files.Any ideas on how i can get them out of this damn
> thing ?.
>
> Many thanks
> Ron.

Hi Ron,

I think you can quite safely ignore your x issues for the time being -
there's other things at play here. I.e. the errors in udev suggest
that there's probably a hardware failure.

However, I'm still a little worried about your environment. When you
boot up using a boot disk, the same commands aren't going to do the
same things you're expecting as it's that boot disk's environment.
I.e. running "init 5" is not going to do anything helpful when using a
boot disk.

Do you know what your hard drive schema is like? I.e. hda1 = boot, hda2 = / etc.

Where abouts are you? If you're near Mt. Eden (Near as in on bus
routes) I might be able to come over and help if thats what becomes
necessary.

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