On 2021-12-26 9:16 a.m., Robert Moskowitz wrote:
I was working away this morning and got a failure with LIbreOffice.
Was not actually using it, but then the dialog popped up without the
content being filled out, Just whatever was on the screen when it
opened...
I could not get OpenOffice to restart. It did create a abrt and tried
to upload a bug report, but that failed.
I tried to open my Fedora mail folder to see if anything was being
discussed, but Thuderbird would not show content of the folder.
Oh, oh time. Time to reboot. But first do a 'dnf update' and got a
new LibreOffice.
Reboot failed. Got dropped in emergency mode. Turned out my /home
partition was not mounted.
I have not had to deal with this in YEARS and I am away from home so
no old system to fall back on. In fact no other computers here.
Internet via my cellphone.
I remembered the disk recovery program started with 'f', fortunately
not too many such and found fsck which I ran on /dev/sda5
Lots of errors I let it fix and as you many guess I am now up and
running.
LibreOffice recovered the docs I had open.
Thunderbird is opening folders.
I guess other things are working,
but 2 items.
LibreOffice uploaded a dump, but I did not create a bug report. Should
I (I did get a new LibreOffice in all this). If so, how do I find
what was uploaded to link to a bug report?
How do I figure out what fsck fixed and what may now be a broken
important file? It could just be tmp junk for all I know.
Anyway big scare here with only a non-working computer and no one to
talk to for help, as I have not been in this sort of recovery mode for
years. I was not looking forward to getting home tonight and THEN
start recoverying.
Backup first order of business tomorrow morning.
I think the first order of business is to run the hardware diagnostics.
You may have failing memory, oxidized connectors, or any of a host of
other possible issues. Reseating the memory and the disk and power
connectors will generally fix mismatched connector plating oxidation
issues for quite a while. While you're in there, blow out the processor
cooling fins under the fan. Its probably mostly plugged by now. If
not, find your local used computer outlet and just replace it for (say)
$150, or get a new one for (say) $1200.
Then, if your hardware (other than the disk) is good, backup what you
need. Almost everything will be on your home directory, and may be
corrupt, but its a good starting place. Get a big $30 thumbdrive or an
external disk to do the backup. If you don't have one, buy one, as you
will need it for future backups.
Then, assuming that you have not found the real problem, it is time to
run the extended (multi-hour) SMART tests on the drive. You will
probably have to buy a new disk. It is now probably progressively
failing in ways that you have not anticipated. This may be the time to
put in an SSD instead of spinning rust, as they are only 3x the price,
and the speedup is impressive.
Then, do a complete fresh install on the new disk. Unless you are a
maintenance dev locked into ancient libs for some reason, upgrade to the
latest version of your distro. If you are not using btrfs, its now the
default in Fedora, and checks for corruption on every read. You may find
like I did, that your motherboard has become unstable in ways not caught
by the diagnostics and causing continuing issues, so you may need that
backup again...
While configuring your new install, reconfig Thunderbird to keep the
email on the upstream host instead of the default download. With fast
networks today, it makes little sense to download every email.
--
John Mellor
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