[Bug 996454] Re: Recovery Mode starts in read-only, does not mount home folder, and hangs when trying to do something

[Steve Valliere]

I booted into 12.04's recovery mode yesterday to look for some lost disk
space that might have been the files that were in the /home folder tree
before I moved it to a separate drive.  I (incorrectly) did not expect
/home to be mounted and when I used the 'mount', 'cat /etc/mtab' and 'df
-h' commands to get a few different ways of seeing what was mounted,
they showed that only / was mounted, as I expected.

Unfortunately, /home actually *WAS* mounted, but none of the three
commands listed above included it in their list.  Yet when I ran 'mount
-t ext4 /dev/sdb1 /mnt/b' and then ran 'mount' the new drive/mount point
WAS listed.  If I created a new file in /home, it was immediately
visible in /mnt/b as well.  This can only mean that /dev/sdb1 was
actually mounted on /home as well as /mnt/b even though none of mount,
mtab and df showed anything mounted on /home.

This is on a live mail server, but if necessary I can boot into recovery
mode again and duplicate the problem, which I would consider to be
rather critical.  The system tools that report mounted drives should
never fail to report something that is actually mounted!

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/996454

Title:
  Recovery Mode starts in read-only, does not mount home folder, and
  hangs when trying to do something

Status in “friendly-recovery” package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  Starting with 12.04, when I boot into Recovery Mode:

  1. The file-system is read-only.

  2. The home folder is not mounted (if on a separate partition).

  3. Choosing to check all disks or to start in low-res graphics mode
  asks to mount read-write but then appears to hang; Ctrl-C is required
  to get back to the menu.

  4. I also notice that on 11.04, Recovery Mode uses smaller text
  (taking advantage of the monitor's resolution), whereas 12.04 uses
  large text.

  What should happen:

  1. File-system read-write, or at least a *working* option to change to
  read-write.

  2. The home folder is mounted.

  3. Check all disks or start low-res graphics should do just that,
  instead of hanging.

  4. The text should use the available resolution of the monitor.

  It is as if the Recovery Mode has not been tested at all.

  (I cannot use ubuntu-bug to report the error, as it wants a specific
  package, which of course does not apply here.)

  System: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS 64-bit, fully updated.
  Related thread: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1975474

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