booting problem
 

hi people,
I have this ubuntu 12.04 box it acts a server at my work place and i really don't want to go thru the lengthy process of reinstallation & configs. i just want to fix it. Anyway the problem is that when u switch it on it boots up to the point of the Ubuntu 12.04 logo and stops there and then goes blank. i really need help on how i can fix this.

thanx

Give us more info what errors does it gives when it hangs up, and try to boot on single user interface or init level 1.

Also remove rgbquiet to see more information while booting?

Of course these things are on grub meny.

hullo DinoFly,

Thanks for yo suggestion. but when i try to boot in recovery mode the message 'the disk drive for / is not ready or present ... i thinks i have got myself a bad disk.

Hiya,

You could try booting the system from a bootable linux CD (such as Knoppix) and investigate what happened to your root partition that way.

I agree with paddy you have recovery cd's and boot from them than check what happened, maybe it is only /etc/fstab messed up or maybe hardware issue. If hardware issues you should get I/O errors on you /var/log/messages. you can access your disk probably with recovery cd's

I agree with paddy you have recovery cd's and boot from them than check what happened, maybe it is only /etc/fstab messed up or maybe hardware issue. If hardware issues you should get I/O errors on you /var/log/messages. you can access your disk probably with recovery cd's

I will sometimes see that message when I boot the Ubuntu 12.04 I have installed. Below that is a message saying press s key to skip and when I do it continues booting. Haven't investigated the reasons why this happens as I don't boot Ubuntu that often. Not sure this is the same error you are seeing?

hello yancek,

Yes that is exact message am getting it continues to say 'press S to to skip mounting or M 4 manual recovery' but even after hitting either key it will still not proceed. Am trying to use Knoppix Live CD to back door and see if i can some how make / bootable. However when removed am able to access the contents of the disk externally, but for some reason grub is failling to boot it.

Use the Knoppix CD and the fsck command to run a filesystem check on whichever partition it is.
You might also use the Knoppix CD to mount the problem Ubuntu partition, go to the /etc/fstab file and see what the entry for the problem partition looks like, maybe post it here. You could also comment it out by putting a hash mark (#) at the beginning of its line to test to see if the system boots. Might make it easier to resolve the issue.

This is what i see in the /etc/fstab file i really don't know what this means right now
i will be greatful if i got some help here.

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc nodev,noexec,nosuid 0 0
# / was on /dev/sda1 during installation
UUID=a4e584ef-c0ac-4d7d-8ab3-b4094878206f / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1
# swap was on /dev/sda5 during installation
UUID=b633c3ba-53cd-4dd7-83b8-73d97303b7f6 none swap sw 0 0

All you have in the fstab file are the root (/) and swap partitions. Don't know why the / system would not be ready? You might run the blkid command as suggested in the fstab file and see if the output is the same as the fstab file for sda1 and sda5. I really doubt that is the problem. The link below has a very detailed explanation of what the different columns in the fstab file mean:

http://www.tuxfiles.org/linuxhelp/fstab.html

ok yancek,

Thanks for the link, but i wuz told that one of my colleagues tried to upgrade the kernel. the os is ubuntu 12.04 running on kernel version 3.2.0-36-generic-pae and i think he tried to do an upgrade to the latest kernel i don't know which one but failed (maybe the one for ubuntu 13.04 not sure). any the system hung up since then and on restart it fails to boot. i gonna have to do it all over again.

You could try to fix it by chroot into the ubuntu from live cd and reinstall the kernel.

First make sure the live cd you are using is the same arch as the installed ubuntu.

then from the live session su to root or use sudo (whichever the live cd you have uses)
then enter

mkdir /mnt/ubuntu
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/ubuntu
mount -o bind /proc /mnt/proc
mount -o bind /sys /mnt/sys
chroot /mnt/ubuntu /bin/bash

then

apt-get update
apt-get install kernel

If you know the kernel version you had previously you should specify it in the command it would be best if you can find that information. also it could be helpful to reinstall gcc

apt-get --reinstall install gcc

finally exit the chroot with these commands.

exit
umount /sys
umount /proc
umount /mnt/ubuntu
exit

then try and boot into your installed system.