Hello,

I'm using ubuntu Edgy for 3/4 month. Strangely, two days ago the PC refused to start the graphical interface, and says:

I've tried even the older versions of the kernel, but the error message is always the same.
I don't think I have changed anything in the configuration, but maybe the system has been updated before the problem.

Do you know what's happened?

Thanks,

ma1069

It looks like there's a problem finding the binary for init (the first user process launched by the kernel) on bootup. Is it possible your hard drive got corrupted? Did you repartition it (e.g. for a new Windows install) any time in the recent past?

You might want to boot off of a live CD like Knoppix to look around and see if your partitions are intact and run fsck/badblocks if needed.

No new install or partition resize, but I have a suspect: could be that if my linux partition is full of data it can't mount?
I know for sure that it has few free space, could it be the problem?

I've tried knoppix, ubuntu live and dsl live but no one of them wants to boot! They simply blocks while they try to mount HD partitions...

It exists a way I can save my datas? I have some very important programs in my linux partition

A partition being full should not prevent it from being mounted. If none of the LiveCDs are able to mount your disk it sounds like a hardware error.

You can try putting te disk in another system and try to read it there (either with a Linux OS installed on that machine or a LiveCD). One other thing to try is boot a LiveCD, don't try to mount ANY partitions, and run badblocks on the disk to see if the disk sectors are failing. If this disk is totally toast, though, your only option is probably a specialized dat recovery firm which will cost you a lot of money.

Do you have any back-ups at all? If not then you need to start making them. Hopefully you'll be able to get your disk mounted.

Luckily I've found out that S.u.S.E. live can boot anyway, so I've maked a backup of everything before trying to fix it up.

I've tried to format the entire linux partition and I've runned scandisk on the windows partitions (I didn't know the badblocks command) but ubuntu still can't boot. Do you think that the problem will fix it up if I format the entire hd or the problem is hardware?

It's really hard to say given the information you've provided (in general remote debugging for problems like this is a pain). Have you tried to look through the Ubuntu partitions to make sure /sbin/init and the various /etc/rc.d files and /etc/inittab still exist and look correct? It seems like the problem was finding /sbin/init, so this is the first place I'd look. Also, double check your grub.conf and make sure it is passing the correct root device to the kernel on boot. While you're at it, check that it specified correctly in /etc/fstab as well.

Since you didn't change any of these things, I'm inclined to think there might be a hardware error on the disk, but you can't know until you check it out. You should be able to run fsck and badblocks from your LiveCD with the partitions unmounted. Read the man pages for those commands if you don't know how to use them.