When Ubuntu fails

I’ve been busy IRL so posting here has taken a backseat to other things, as well I haven’t had a lot of time to tinker. This is an old draft I had kicking around that I’ve cleaned up a bit.

Yes, I’m guilty of running for ‘weeks’ with a pending reboot required, this is probably not helping the situation.  I’ve probably also had several power fails etc with the system in a suspended state. Still, I didn’t expect my Ubuntu system to get to the state it did.

After rebooting my system, the system drive would no longer boot and I was dumped into the (initramfs) busybox

mount: mounting /dev on /root/dev failed: No such file or directory
mount: mounting /sys on /root/sys failed: No such file or directory
mount: mounting /proc on /root/proc failed: No such file or directory
Target Filesystem doesn't have /sbin/init.
No init found. Try passing init=bootarg.

BusyBox v1.10.2 (Ubuntu 1:1.10.2-2ubuntu7) built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

(initramfs)

Ok I think, so there is some filesystem issue with my boot drive – booting a live CD version of Ubuntu should give me the tools to fix it. It turns out the answer was no – the live CD won’t help me either. Sigh, this is the type of thing I’d expect of Windows Vista but not Ubuntu.

Off the to forums and I turn up a post which shows others have had the same issue and the solution. From here it was a simple matter of booting the Ubuntu live CD to download a copy of SLAX to burn to CD then boot from the new SLAX CD to repair the ext4 filesystem. Good thing I had a Ubuntu live CD around.

Once your booted into SLAX, start a root shell and find the volume.

root@slax:~# fdisk -l

This will list all of the drives (if you have more than one) and the partitions on those drives. Next is simply a matter of issuing the filesystem check and repair command on the correct partition

root@slax:~# fsck /dev/sda2

You’ll want to say yes to fixing the problems obviously. Once this completes, simply reboot back to a working system.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *