Hi all! I'm a Linux/Ubuntu noob who has recently bought a brand new HP laptop, nuked the Win 8 OS that it came/w & installed Ubuntu 14.04LTS. After DL/installing apps & setting it up a bit I decided to use gparted & partition my HDD for an additional OS, isolate programs from files, adjust swap, etc. All went well until I was prompted to reboot which I did & now I'm stuck @

" BusyBox v1.21.1 (Ubuntu 1:1.21.0-1ubuntu1) multi-call binary.

usage: chroot NEWROOT [PROG ARGS]

Run PROG with root directory set to NEWROOT "

Which invariably produces: (no matter what command I enter?!?)

" (initramfs) boot from BIOS
/bin/sh: boot: not found "

I'm quite confused @ how to proceed here?

My primary concern is the health of my machine through/after this is worked out.
That said, I'd love to not have to re-install Ubuntu/apps, etc. as I was partitioning the HDD because I had gotten it to a nice back-up place & felt ready to set it up.
Like I said I'm new to Linux/Ubuntu & waayyy behind on my terminal coding, but I could really use some pointers here & I'm not usually hard to teach. lol
Help?! :-[
Thanx!
Embarrassingly yours, WS.

Dear wolfshadow,
Please, forgive me if I explain it too loose, I am writing you from memory and I do not know what level of newbie you are.
I have had the same problem a couple of times.
In order to help you we will need later some output of commands so we can see more inside of your machine.
It seems to me that something went wrong. Here are some hints.
During installation process, you said your machine to do something with Windows, you probably did something to the MBR also (just in case, it is the part of the hard disk where the information is held of how to start the machine)
Now you have a Linux not finished installed in your machine.
Probably there is a way to make it launch, as most of the files are already installed.
However your machine do not know what and where to look for the install.
You could tell your machine using some coding in which partition are the vmlinuz and the initrd files that is looking for.
Are you able to look this information in internet?.
Some more tips.
Ubuntu probably wanted you to install grub2 (it is the program that start the machine), maybe it is not properly installed.
You could start your machine, insert a Live-CD or Live-DVD in the machine and reboot it so it will read from your DVD. In the Live CD/DVD there is an option that says check your system or tell me what are the options you are given.

If you found this information already in internet
you have to use some commands like set and tell hard disk partition, file to look in and the magic word boot.
It is not so easy first time, but there are tutorials.
Please, let me know if I can help you further.

Faithfully,
M.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanx for the advise. I've researched some more, & I believe that the HDD is currently unmounted (part of the steps I had executed during the failed partitioning) because after booting from my USB drive the code I got back was as follows:

"Begin: Loading essential drivers... done.
Begin: Running /scripts/init-premount... ln: /tmp/mountroot-fail-hooks.d/20-lvm
2: File exists
done.
Begin: Mounting root file system... Begin: Running /scripts/local-top... read_urandom: /dev/urandom: open failed: no such file or directory
No volume groups found
Begin: Waiting for encrypted source device... ... done.
Check cryptopts=source= bootarg: cat /proc/cmdline
or missing modules, devices: cat /proc/modules; ls /dev-r ALERT! /dev/disk/by-uuid/33ec3667-0a02-437f-b63b-38fc98196c1a does not exist. Dropping to a shell!"

& then repeats the prompt it was giving before. :/

My apologies for the spotty presence here, but my internet connectivity is almost non-existent where I live & lots of non-cyber work to do there as well. I appreciate the help & it seems to be at least a little clearer now what's wrong.

Any ideas how to remount my (encrypted :/) HDD after this FUBAR episode?