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My root account is corrupt or something every time I log into it I just get a blank desktop. I can move my cursor and right click and I get a few options but that's it. I CANNOT open a terminal from this account. I can however use my guest account but it is very limited. I can't save anything and I cant use sudo. Which means that I can't create a new user account from the guest account. The only boot device I have is the flash drive that I used to install Ubuntu with in the first place. I've only been using this operating system for about a month so I'm not too familiar with all the bells and whistles. Is there anything I can do to fix this?

Alex
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  • Cheer up. The type of difficulty you are having is extremely rare and usually (in my personal experience) indicates a hardware problem, and is not the fault of the user in any way. It is very possible your hard drive is faulty (most people install ubuntu on hardware previously used for windows, and therefore rather old and abused). To find out if your hard drive is weak, please boot to the flashdrive you mentioned and open "diskutility". It will (probably) tell you if your hard drive is dying. I wish ubuntu would check the stability of the hard drive at install time. – gyropyge Nov 17 '14 at 10:29

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  1. You can re-install ubuntu completely, which I would recommend in this scenario.

  2. Boot into recovery mode following the below instructions:

Booting into recovery mode Switch on your computer. Wait until the BIOS has finished loading, or has almost finished. (During this time you will probably see a logo of your computer manufacturer.) Quickly press and hold the Shift key, which will bring up the GNU GRUB menu. (If you see the Ubuntu logo, you've missed the point where you can enter the GRUB menu.) Select the line which starts with "Advanced options".

Select the line ending with "(recovery mode)", probably the second line, something like:

Ubuntu GNU/Linux, with Linux 3.8.0-26-generic (recovery mode) Press Return and your machine will begin the boot process. After a few moments, your workstation should display a menu with a number of options. One of the options (you may need to scroll down to the bottom of the list) will be "Drop to root shell prompt". Press Return with this option highlighted.

The root partition is mounted read-only. To mount it read/write, enter the command

mount -o remount,rw / If you have /home, /boot, /tmp, or any other mount point on a separate partition, you can mount them with the command

mount --all

Once in recovery mode, open terminal and execute the following commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install --reinstall ubuntu-desktop
sudo apt-get install unity
sudo shutdown -r now
GoOnGetErDone
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