OK, latest problem. VLC stopped working

I put a couple of movies (AVI format) onto my hard drive. They worked fine. Then I tried to play one off of a flash card that I suspect is a dodgy. It didn't work and transferring movies from that card seems to work fine but then they dont play. After trying that this morning now the films that did work, don't. I just get sound and a black screen. Whatever has happened also seems to have knocked out my webcam. Isn't Linux supposed to be more reliable? I'm having no end of trouble with this machine! Any ideas?

 

It is more reliable , many more worse things could happen under Windows

 

Loathed as I am to suggest it, but
have you tried switching it off and on again ;?
(by which I mean, shutdown and reboot)

 

Yes, tried that. Tried removing it and installing it again but when I remove it the computer shows the software is missing but then says it's still there when I try to install it. Getting very close to getting a refund on this now. Please help.

 

It's possible there is some corruption on your harddisk.
Try running fsck on it to repair it and let us know if it helps...
viewtopic.php?f=67&t=6885&p=45025&hilit=hammering#p45025

 

Thanks for helping but all it did was refuse, it said permission denied, must be in root, which i was by booting while holding Ctrl an pressing C. If I did the Sudo shutdown path the machine locks itself up slid and stops responding. I have no hair left to tear out.

 

Did you hold ctrl and repeatedly press c, quickly over and over again all the time it was booting?
(screen will go black 3 times during this, you still need to keep repeatedly pressing c)
and note, you may need to wait a minute or two after issuing the shutdown command
before you are dumped to the root# prompt.
If so shutdown still hangs, I'd recommend booting from a usb stick and running fsck that way.

 

An hour later it's still hanging....

 

- Oh dear.. Well I still think checking the disk is a good idea.
I suggest booting from a usb stick and fsck'ing from that.

 

It won't do that either... I set it to boot from the USB but it ignores it and starts as normal. I'm really at as loss here.

 

What Linux are you trying to boot from usb? I'd suggest Puppy...
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=6607
You could make sure your usb disk boots properly of a different PC first...
You need to press f12 at the start of the boot to select to boot from usb.
(or alter boot order in bios)

 

Ok... this is getting immensely frustrating now. I read it was F2 so was trying that to reorder the boot preferences. I tried F12 with a little optomism and the list has only 2 items, the hard-drive and the network and no USB option. Neither one drives it from the USB (I tried both several times) . I'm using Linux as it comes on the machine but would be more than happy to change to something less constricting. I basically am looking for a mobile version of my massive slab of a home Laptop with a good spread of mobile options. I nearly got to the point where this was happening but then VLC died and it's all sort of coming apart now. Is it worth swapping to another OS? I had thought of Ubuntu anyway.

 

OK, don't panic - This is all pretty much par for the course... Sorry it's feeling frustrating...
My advice, follow the link in my previous post and make a usb stick that boots Puppy.
(or search and follow posts for live booting other flavours of Linux from a usb stick)
Test that the stick works by using it to boot another PC,
(don't worry about it actually boot here, just so long as it gets as far as being detected as a boot device).
Once you've booted your One with that (f12 to select) you can to check the Ones internal disk.

Open a terminal in puppy then if you do (in some OS you may need to prefix these with sudo)
$ fdisk -l
This will show you the storage devices in your system,
look for a line something like this (some numbers may vary)...
/dev/sda1 * 1 850 6827593+ 83 Linux
You can then do
$ umount /dev/sda1
$ fsck -y /dev/sda1
(replacing /dev/sda1 with the match from the first step) to check and fix the disk...

If this doesn't help, I reckon it's time to move to another OS. This process will start by making a bootable usb stick like you've just made, so that's a good place to start whatever...