Solved HDD crash - trying to recover

[rmomota]

I know that sometimes, system changes do not take effect you are logged out, or until you reboot.

true
I would say that something went wrong in your pkg upgrade, which is not normal too, and you didn't notice.
then after sometime in idle something reloaded and crashed until reinstalled.
but I would do a backup anyway, you should backup at least once per month.

 

[walterbyrd]

true
I would say that something went wrong in your pkg upgrade, which is not normal too, and you didn't notice.
then after sometime in idle something reloaded and crashed until reinstalled.
but I would do a backup anyway, you should backup at least once per month.

Thank you. I did a backup.

 

[walterbyrd]

Are we trying to diagnose a failed disk drive (disk crash) or a corrupted file system, or are we playing with a computer?

If you are interested in fixing the disk / file system / mount problems, you don't need a GUI, you don't need X, you don't need any browsers. You are much better off working from the console, initially in single user mode only.

It seems to me that most of your problems can be explained by interesting misconfigurations of your complex user environment. Except the fact that ZFS doesn't mount is a bit puzzling.

I thought it was a total hdd crash. I could not login multiuser, and my /home directory was empty.
There may be corruption, but the files in my /home directory were still there, it's just that the file system was not mounting.
Somehow, reinstalling MATE seemed to fix it.
I am not sure what caused the corruption. It could have been an upgrade I did earlier that day. But why would an upgrade corrupt my system like that?

 

[ralphbsz]

Indeed, that's a tough question. I don't use a GUI on my FreeBSD system, so I don't know what the install of various DE components could do. Since MATE probably contains things like mounting tools and apps that watch the system status (and have privileges to do things), it might be able to break mounting. Or its install script could have messed up one of the vital /etc/rc... files.

 

[hedwards]

TBH, this is a large part of why I don't like having a GUI start up automatically upon boot, I've just had too many headaches over the years for something that I can easily start myself when I'm ready.

 

[rmomota]

But why would an upgrade corrupt my system like that?

I can see it only if it was interrupted for some reason.
What kind of upgrade was it?
do you have pkgbase enabled?
pkg upgrade should not mess up the boot, it's mostly dkms drivers, libs, tools and apps.
It should be safe as you can reinstall missing packages again, but if it updates the login manager (gdm, sddm or other) or some of it's dependencies that could break the startup to the login.
but if pkgbase is enabled that one can mess up the system if upgrade gets interrupted.
The behavior described, "can't login" and "home directory seems to be empty", seems a problem mounting home directory zfs dataset, if you have one, but reinstalling Mate wouldn't solve that situation.
I don't have enough information to be sure of what happened there.
Good your system is back.