After using 7.10 on my HP laptop for 6 months I tried to boot yesterday and when it got to the splash screen the progress bar stopped at about 1% and hung there for a couple of minutes. Then it dropped me to the command line: (initramfs).

If anyone has any idea as to where to start looking I would appreciate it.

Issue a dmesg command to see if there were any boot error messages. Read the dmesg output from back to front.

dmesg | less

-----------------
Steve Stites

Did you just recompile the kernel? Could you please post the lines from your GRUB configuration menu file which correspond to the kernel you are booting with?

Jailbait: I'm unable to pipe neither "less" nor "more" with "dmesg". It returns "/bin/sh : less: not found", but when I run dmesg I see nothing on the last page referencing any boot errors.
Anket: No, I haven't recompiled. In fact I have made no changes in months. Everything was working so I didn't want to fix it.

Reading any files may be problematic since I can't use less, more or even the ls command. If a fix is not easily found I may just go ahead and install 8.04 since I have my /home on a separate drive.
Thanks for the replies.

Come up in "recovery mode" - that way you'll get to see all the messages instead of the useless bloody splash screen.
Might give you a better idea.

(sorry bout the rant .... )

Syg00: In recovery mode the screen stops with:
Begin: Mounting Root file system.......
Begin: Running /scripts/local-top........
Done
Begin: Waiting for root file system.......

It then hangs for several minutes and goes to command line (initramfs)

(don't worry about the rant, I agree)

Syg00: A little additional info. After,

In recovery mode the screen stops with:
Begin: Mounting Root file system.......
Begin: Running /scripts/local-top........
Done
Begin: Waiting for root file system....... (several minutes go by)
Done.
ALERT! /dev/disk/by-uuid/48cd51a2-0689-4ee8-addd-cb145e23676c does not exist.
Dropping to a shell!
Check your root= boot argument (cat /proc/cmdline)
Check for missing modules (cat /proc/modules), or device files (ls /dev)
(initramfs)

When I run "cat /proc/cmdline" it returns :
root=UUID=48cd51a2-0689-4ee8-addd-cb145e23676c ro single

When I run "cat /proc/modules" it returns:
thermal 14344 0 - Live 0xf883f000
fan 5764 0 - Live 0xf8834000
commoncap 8320 1 apparmor, Live 0xf880c000
(initramfs)

Which, of course, tells me very little.

Any ideas ?

That's your problem. Done an update lately ???.

I get rid of UUID and use /dev/sd?? so I know what's what. Try "ls -al /dev/disk/by-uuid" from your shell - hopefully will work, and it'll give you an idea of the correct UUID. Either use that, or the device it's linked to. You can over-ride the boot parameters at the grub menu - it's a "one time" change that'll get you running. Then harden the change in menu.lst.

<rant> ... no maybe not ...

Syg00:
I ran "ls -al /dev/disk/by-uuid" and got "/bin/sh: ls: not found". This shell doesn't have a lot of commands in it.

Yeah, sorry - you did say that back in #4. Have a play at the grub menu - you should be able to guess which partition you are using; try root=/dev/sda1 or sda2 or whatever. Else fix it from a liveCD; even the Hardy one.

Syg00: I put in the Hardy live CD and tried to mount hda2 which should be the boot partition for linux. It returned "Special device /dev/hda2 does not exist". Since my /home is on a 2nd drive would not it be easier to just install Hardy over Gutsy in the 1st drive ? And will it see my /home on /hdb1 with no problem ?
Since I'm on the other side of the world from you I'll have to put this off till tomorrow. Early day at work.
Thanks for all your assistance.

Probably now known as /dev/sda2 - do a "sudo fdisk -l" (lower case ell) from a terminal.
I'm not recommending Hardy to anyone (see some of my recent posts), but that's certainly an option. With a separate /home partition, use the same user and password, and all your old settings will work with nothing lost. Mail/browsers - that sort of thing.

Syg00:Just wanted to say thanks for the assistance last friday. I finally had to give up and install Hardy Heron. I kept my /home on a different drive so when I booted after install everything was back to normal except for the fact that my broadcom wireless doesn't work. I'll worry with that later.
Thanks again for you time,
Ogee