Guest Darthcoder Posted October 25, 2007 Report Share Posted October 25, 2007 After I connected some USB devices Mandriva 2008 recognised them and I used them, when I was finished I could not find howto "safely remove" them (yeah WIN XP speak), so I shut down mandriva, but during reboot it drops out of graphical interface and then I dont now howto shut it down , anyway I reconnected same USB devices (on same ports) now it sits in non-graphical mode and list Buffer I/O errors on dev sda1 (one of the USB drives). What now???? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mitchell Posted October 25, 2007 Report Share Posted October 25, 2007 Ouch... I'll give you some ideas on what I'd try, but please keep in mind I'm also new to Linux, and Mandriva. It's highly likely none of this will work, and you might want to consider waiting for someone with more experience to reply...but if you're desperate... Firstly, what usb devices did you connect? Also, what desktop environment are you using? If you are using KDE, there are options to be able to see some usb devices on the desktop when you connect them. To safely remove, you must right click on their icons, and select 'safely remove'. With my usb drives they will flash repeatedly then until I remove them, and the desktop icon will disappear. I haven't tried too many other devices for 2008.0, but I would assume it's similar. If you haven't enabled these to show up on your desktop, (right click on desktop and choose 'configure desktop', there are settings there under 'behavior' and 'device icons'). This will work for storage media, however for other devices I'm not sure. I'd try a couple things now. Firstly, can you shut down your box again? If you're in text mode, try hitting "ctrl+Alt+F1" (F2,F3, etc) This should (depending on how far your system has booted up) get you into a console, where you can access your system from there. Log in as a user, and type "halt" (without the quotation marks, that just tells you what to type). This should stop everything and shutdown your box. Then disconnect the usb devices, and try to reboot again. You can also hit "Alt+Prt Scn+B" to reboot your system, but this isn't much better than simply shutting off the power for your box. Mandriva 2008.0, and many modern linux systems, use the ext3 filesystem, which creates a journal of everything you do, so that if your computer mysteriously shuts down (power dies, whatever), you are generally safer and there's usually more chance of recovering data which you were working on. When the computer boots up it reads from the journal. Anyway, some useless knowledge for you to ponder. If all else fails, I would shot off the box manually, diconnect your usb devices, and reboot again. Good luck, sorry I can't be of more help. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Darthcoder Posted October 26, 2007 Report Share Posted October 26, 2007 Thanks Mitchel for the halt tip, however still sits in text mode, teher must be a way of "flushing" these devices? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
67GTA Posted October 26, 2007 Report Share Posted October 26, 2007 You removed the usb devices, rebooted the PC, and it still boots into text mode? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mitchell Posted October 26, 2007 Report Share Posted October 26, 2007 Yeah, it's not usually advisable, but if I were you I'd pull the plug, remove the usb devices, then reboot without them. I'll be surprised if you do that and are still in text mode. Linux is generally abit hardier than windows, you're unlikely to totally stuff your system if you pull the usb devices out, and reboot without doing it all properly. With Wiindows XP I'm not so sure... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
{BBI}Nexus{BBI} Posted October 26, 2007 Report Share Posted October 26, 2007 To reboot from commandline, as root type: reboot. To shutdown, again as root type: shutdown -h now. I think Alt+Ctrl+Del will also perform a gracefull shutdown. You could always try using top to locate and kill the process(es) preventing you from shutting down. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AussieJohn Posted October 26, 2007 Report Share Posted October 26, 2007 Hello Darthcoder. Whenever you have inserted a USB removable device the appropriate icon will appear on your desktop. If not then it will certainly appear in the Devices icon on your desktop. All you needed to do was right click on the particular devices icon and you would have got a drop down menu that included the option Remove Safely. Just that simple. Cheers. John. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Darthcoder Posted October 26, 2007 Report Share Posted October 26, 2007 yes it boots up normally but falls back into text mode as I said elsewhere I did not see any "remove" icon Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Darthcoder Posted October 26, 2007 Report Share Posted October 26, 2007 after I type "startx" (as found in another post) I get get a completely different desktop than before, also "newly" installed software such as Thunderbird cannot be found Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Valikhan Posted October 26, 2007 Report Share Posted October 26, 2007 (edited) If you have Windows XP, you can boot up in there, then plug in those usb and safely remove in Windows XP. Go back to Mandriva and see what happen. It did trick to me. If you do not have WinXP, then I do not know. Sorry, buddy. P.S. Win XP on the same machine I meant. Edited October 26, 2007 by Valikhan Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AussieJohn Posted October 26, 2007 Report Share Posted October 26, 2007 I did not say there was any remove icon anywhere.. I Repeat:-"All you needed to do was right click on the particular devices icon and you would have got a drop down menu that included the option Remove Safely" Note the "right click on the particular devices icon". I am sorry I cannot make it any clearer. John. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neddie Posted October 26, 2007 Report Share Posted October 26, 2007 after I type "startx" (as found in another post) I get get a completely different desktop than before, also "newly" installed software such as Thunderbird cannot be found It sounds like you've done something a little bit more than just plug in a USB mouse. Have you changed your repositories, done any updates / upgrades? Shutting down the machine without "safely" removing the usb devices shouldn't matter a jot, as all drives will be cleanly unmounted as part of the shutdown. But it sounds like something else has happened, unrelated to the usb devices. What do you mean by "completely different desktop", do you mean it used to be gnome and now it's kde, or just the background picture has changed, or what? And with thunderbird, does it start when you run "thunderbird" from a console or the "Run command" dialog? Maybe it's just missing from the menu? Or has it really been uninstalled? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Darthcoder Posted October 26, 2007 Report Share Posted October 26, 2007 The bottom bar on the desktop opens to a completely different "menu" in fact the word menu has disappeared and no KDE is there allthough come to think of it when I installed (rpmdrake?) Thunderbird it said something about un-installing some parts of KDE... So that brings me to the question of re-installing KDE or is gnome better? I will try and figure out the run command. A lot of my clumsiness is not helped by the fact that helped refuses to be indexed, so search is very slow and tedious Mind you right now it even keels over during the startx something about client 1 rejected from localhost Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Darthcoder Posted October 26, 2007 Report Share Posted October 26, 2007 Correction startx works for root user , installing KDE now Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spinynorman Posted October 26, 2007 Report Share Posted October 26, 2007 Darthcoder - I've removed your new topic about reinstalling. Please post all questions relating to this problem here, otherwise it gets very confusing. :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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