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When I boot ubuntu 12.04, I get this message on screen and the the system does not boot. This happened after I did the following:

  1. I installed tor-browser.
  2. When I tried to run it, it gave an error that /usr/bin/tor-browser permissions are set to root. So I did the following (was a mistake):

    sudo chown -R USERNAME /usr/
    
  3. Now when I tried to run sudo, it gave the error:

    sudo: setuid must be root
    
  4. To fix this, I rebooted to go to the GRUB menu. There I entered 'e' to edit the commands before booting. In the command beginning with linux, I appended rw init=/bin/bash so that I can get a root logged in terminal (I have forgotten my root password).

  5. When the command prompt loaded, I entered the following commands:

    mount -o remount,rw /
    mount --all
    chown root:root /usr/bin/sudo
    chmod 4755 /usr/bin/sudo
    
  6. Now when I rebooted, Ubuntu does not boot and gives the message

    could not write bytes: broken pipe
    
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  • Do the recovery mode still works?
    – Braiam
    Feb 8, 2014 at 1:29

1 Answer 1

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There may be a way to get things back into a working state -- perhaps booting off a rescue disk and using apt to re-bootstrap the disk and reinstall all the packages that are currently installed. But honestly it's probably more work than it's worth.

Instead your best bet is probably to start over, and use this as an opportunity to upgrade to the latest release. While it may not be your only option, it's likely the quickest reliable solution.

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