HELP... CRASHED! Old Vaio with Mint 19.1 Cinnamon 4.15.0.151
 

Hi
Not really a Newbie, but a 12yr gui only user. Not really a computer guy, I could never master the command line. As an old dad, I just inherit the families old PCs and install Ubuntu on them.

So today I was doing some gmailing in Mozzila on this old vaio PCG-61A1L. Then I switched to a Libre doc and it wouldn't open. I tried launching Office Libre.. nada.

Re booting I get an initramfs. That's a new one for me.
When I relaunch in recovery mode, I get:

...CONTAINS FILE SYSTEM ERRORS,CHECK FORCED.
...7 URANDOM WARNINGS DUE TO RATELIMITING /dev/sda1:
UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCIES, RUN fsk MANUALLY.
fsk exited with status code 4 done.
FAILURE: file system check of the root file system failed
The root filesystem on /dev/sda1 requires a manual fsck

And then (initramfs)

Is this easily recoverable? I'm traveling and only have this laptop, my phone, and my wife's Chrome book, in case I need to make a bootable USB.

Please reassure me that my docs will be recoverable.

Thanks to any and all for your help!

Do you have an install media that can be run live? If not you will need one.
Boot the live image from usb stick then run fsck on /dev/sda1 and each other partition on /dev/sda as well. You will need to run fsck from a command line. Once that is done then it likely will boot for you.

The question about all your docs depends on where the actual file corruption is (which files are corrupt).

If it has a separate boot partition, the /boot directory is probably plugged up with excess kernels. I learned to run command: apt autoremove once in a while to deal with that automatically.
Best to run Ubuntu live and check disk space in /boot, may need to chroot into the installation to remove old kernels.
EDIT: Classic signs of incomplete build of initrd.img from a kernel upgrade due to lack of disk space, you may be able to boot to an older kernel. However, Debian based distros rebuild initrd.img for every kernel every time there is a change, so hopefully you have one complete kernel.

Thanks for that guys. Yes I figured it would come to that. I need find a usb stick as I don't even have one with me atm.
And yes, I must have 50 or more old kernels on this old laptop. Thanks for the tip of deleting them. I tried booting from some of the older ones, but got the same results.
In all my previous distro installs over the years, I've always been given the option to save my data. Hopefully that will happen this time as well.
Cheers

Could he not run the fsck from initramfs?

1. Don't panick.
2. Your docs are recoverable (almost certainly, but no guarantees)

Bootable USB is the easiest and best solution here. Just follow step 1 first before doing anything with a bootable USB stick, to assure you don't make any bad decisions.

There are 2 main paths to take in this situation:
1) Restore the bootloader/initrd/kernel situation (can get complicated)
2) Boot a temporary GNU/Linux distro from a live USB & mount your old /home to access the files

Since you are not home, going for a temporary solution #2 is probably the best choice for now. But you will probably need to do #2 with backup at a later point or #1 or some variant.

You could probably use Mint on a liveUSB. If not Manjaro is probably a good choice.

Let us know if you get a USB stick going.

Actually, this could be a good thing. This gives alot of potential options.

You could edit your bootloader entry and try to run a kernel without an initrd (if your hardware/installation) allows that. If you have GRUB, it's quite easy, you can just press the "e" button when hovered over an entry. There you can edit basically the whole boot entry if you want.

The best way to go about it, is to gather "intel" from your various boot options, then try to find a Kernel that you can boot without an initrd (or possibly with one). That depends a little bit on the situation. It is also quite tricky to figure out a full correct boot entry without good information. But it could be as easy as removing the "initrd" entry in one of the boot entries.

Did you try any other boot entries in the bootloader?

If you feel real brave you could to to append "fsck.mode=skip" to your bootline (after vmlinuz-x.x.x), but it could make things worse.

Not sure about Mint as I don't use it much, but Ubuntu and it's Gremlins tend to push enabling auto updates. Not that there's anything wrong with that (Seinfeld). So... users don't need to think about updates, which may be part of the plan. They should also rig apt to run autoremove once a month when auto updates are enabled to avoid the excess kernels/modules/headers.

I update many Operating Systems at the same time from one Operating System using scripts to chroot into them and update/upgrade, the command: apt autoremove -y is run every round and I only have two kernels maximum and everything appears to run smooth.

Thanks Hazel Zeebra Brains

I've got mint 19.1 ios downloaded on my wife's chromebook, and picked up a usb stick in a small town we drove through yesterday. This morning I'll see what I can do.
Zeebra thanks for all that. I confess most is over my head. Like I say I'm just a gui user. I can probably count on one hand the times I've successfully used the command line, and that was probably cut and pasting a solution I found online!

Brains, you're right, mint sends dozens of updates every week. They don't auto load, but nor do I sift through them for just the security patches. I just load em all.

Thanks again. I'll let you know how it goes.

So ... Murph strikes again.
My wife's levono c330 chromebook wouldn't recognize the new usb to load the iso onto.
Evidently others have had this issue, but I couldn't find a working solution.

Another bright idea. My phone has a microSD and I have the adapter. The chromebook DID recognize it, and I was able to xfer the iso to it, select external boot device from the vaio bios... only to find that "external device " doesn't include microSD!

So, I'm back to Brains suggestion using e in GRUB to edit the boot. I picked an older kernel and removed the initrd line. No change booting without it. Funny enough the line reappears afterwards.

I'm open to any other suggestions. Thanks

Kinda find it odd this model of Chromebook don't recognize it. It's possible the stick is large enough it came formatted exfat and the Chromebook don't have exfat support enabled.
Keep in mind, simply copying the ISO to a stick will not make it bootable, it has to be written to the USB. Chromebook is Diamonds to me, something I have no experience with.

Well, first. You could try to remove that last line that says "initrd", the whole line.. Then press ctrl+x to execute the edited boot entry (kernel without initrd). It will probably not work, but it's worth a try.

Second. You could try to pass a line to skip fsck. It could potentially be a risk and make things worse. But you just have to add to the line that starts with "linux".. between "ro" and "quiet", then press ctrl+x to execute the edited boot.

The best option however, is probably the USB route with a live distro.

Thanks for the reminder. It's been awhile since I wrote my last ISO to a CD or USB. And agreed, chromebook is weird and frustrating every rare time I get on one.

@ Zeebra, I DID remove that line in one of the older kernels. It didn't make a difference and then just reverted on the next boot attempt.

And no, I'm not ready to try any risky commands, as I wouldn't know enough to fix it.

The actual risk is that you could make the disk corruption worse (maybe), but I'm not sure. And I'm also not sure it would work.

Anyways, the safe option is the USB.
I don't know much about Chrome OS, but you could try this:
https://technastic.com/create-a-boot...-on-chrome-os/

I searched "chrome OS write an iso to a USB" in a search engine, and a number of results showed up, that was the first one.

It reverts because of the way GRUB works. Unlike older bootloaders that actually used a stored menu, GRUB2 creates the menu on the fly from its configuration file, which is basically a very complicated script. To change the menu permanently you have to change the config file. Hand editing on screen only affects the current boot.