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Oh no, I have broken pipes!


SueD

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Hi all. :)

 

Been a while, eh? Anyways, my beautiful machine has worked almost flawlessly for 4 years now with nary a problem until now. Upon booting up today, it will boot into tty1 or if I restart, I'll get the message Could not write bytes: Broken pipes and nothing else.

 

I've done a search and most of the similar problems are on dual boots machines (which I don't use). Still, I tried following their fixes but nothing works. I'm at a loss of what to do.

 

I'm running Ubuntu 12.04 lts.

 

Ideas please?

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Sue!!!!!!!! :) So great to see you again. I hope you have been well.

Let's see what we got here. So you never get past tty1? Did you by chance try Ctrl+Alt+F1 before the broken pipe error displays to see if you can log in via terminal?

 

Also, was there any major changes made prior to this happening? Driver updates, installing a particular package etc? Do you still have the boot disk or thumbdrive for 12.04? If not, you can get it online of course. ;)

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*waves* Hiya Ian! Long time no see. I've been very well, thank you. Hope you can say the same?

 

There was some kind of hardware update recently but I can't remember exactly what (nvidia, maybe?) or when.

 

And yeah, I tried Ctrl+Alt+F1 and can't get in at all from there. Startx gives me something that says no startx found or similar. At the moment, it's sitting at the no pipes thingy.

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Guest LilBambi

Hey Sue! Great to see you!!

 

I found this over at Ubuntu forums here:

 

SOLVED: could not write bytes: Broken pipe

 

My problem was plural errors which led to non-guru confusion loop inside my brain. I fixed it after consulting several forum help-request posts (mostly answered by bogan).

 

Broken pipe went away by re-upgrading nvidia from scratch, like so...

 

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get purge nvidia-*

sudo apt-get install invida-current-updates

 

 

Which repaired the mis-match in drivers. But that still left me stuck in a password entry loop (same as before but without the broken pipe message flashing in between). The reason for the login loop was that root now had ownership of my Xauthority file. Per another how-to, I just removed it, like so...

 

sudo rm .Xauthority

 

Then I rebooted and all was hunky dory.

 

Thanks to all

 

 

Hope it helps!

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securitybreach

Hiya Sue, welcome back! :thumbup:

 

BTW in Fran's post above, there is a misprint on the last apt-get command.. It should say sudo apt-get install nvidia-current-updates

 

B)

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Hi Fran and Josh! I still drop by from time to time, just to make sure you're all behaving. ;) I'm just not usually logged in.

 

Grr, I hate this laptop, it deleted a whole whack of stuff I'd written.

 

Bottom line, I did the commands (including Josh's correction for the 3rd) and got the following...

 

The following informationmay help resolve the situation:

The following package have unmet dependecies:nvidial-current-updates : Depends : nvidia-304-updates but it is not going to be installed

E: Unable to correct problems, you have held brokenb packages

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securitybreach

That command will force the other command to complete. So what happened after you ran the last command I gave you?

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securitybreach

Once you have the problem solved, you might consider doing weekly backups, system and data. Just a thought. :whistling:

 

I use clonezilla to make weekly snapshots of my installation partition.

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I came across that about half an hour ago. Nice to try but it I can't get into my desktop, how else can I do that?

 

Ah, I see now. :)

Edited by SueD
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I accidentally hit the up button and this time the apt-get install -f worked this time.

 

The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer reqiured: screen-resolution-extra libc6-i386 lib32gcc1 dkms

Use apt-get autoremove to remove them.

 

Just guessing this is my next move?

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securitybreach

I accidentally hit the up button and this time the apt-get install -f worked this time.

 

The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer reqiured: screen-resolution-extra libc6-i386 lib32gcc1 dkms

Use apt-get autoremove to remove them.

 

Just guessing this is my next move?

 

Good deal!! Yeah, run sudo apt-get autoremove

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Quick question since it's been awhile since I did this but...

 

Do I have to format my /home when installing this newer version?

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securitybreach

No as long as it is on a separate partition, hence why it is a good idea to use separate partitions for / and /home.

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