Hello.

I've been running Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy) for a while with no special problems. It's on a separate hard drive in a removable drawer. The disk has been out of the machine for about 24 hours. It had been working fine and I have made no recent installations or other changes.

When I put in the disk and tried to boot into Ubuntu as usual, I got this:

Alert! /dev/hdc1 does not exist. Dropping to shell!

It just hung on that.

After going to Windows and coming back, I got the same thing several times. Once, it continued, saying:

BusyBox v1.00-pre10 (Debian 20040623-1ubuntu 22) Built in shell (ash).
Enter 'help' for a list of built in commands.
/bin/sh: can't access tty: job control turned off
#_

Usually, it doesn't get that far, but just hangs on the first message.

Can anyone tell me how such a thing could happen and what - if anything - I can do about it?

Thanks very much.

How it could happen: for removable data media of the usb variety, unplugging the device before umounting has the same effect as a hard shutdown (power loss, however achieved). You risk data corruption.

Did you umount before unplugging the drive? If no, then you may have corrupted one or more files needed for booting.

How to fix it? If you have a liveCD to boot into, do so with the removable drive plugged in. Then try fsck on the removable drive. Do not mount it. Run fsck on unmounted partitions.

Hi.

Thanks for the reply.

No, this is not a USB or other removable device. A computer has room and cables for two hard drives (at least). The drawers, which I've been using for years, simply plug in to the cables. That way, you can remove one hard drive and put in another without opening the machine. However, this is exactly the same as if you did open it and change the hard drives.

There's nothing to unmount. Before changing drives, I turn off the machine completely...going out of Linux (or Windows) in the proper way...using the menu to shut down. Once the OS is out and the machine is off, I can switch hard drives. Either by plugging in a different drawer or by going to CMOS and changing the boot sequence to access one of the two hard drives.

I'm not sure if I'm making myself clear, but this is simply having two hard drives in the machine and booting to whichever one you want. In this case, I can remove one without going into the box because the drawer plugs in and out of the cable connections,which are permanently connected to the fixed frame of the drawer.

It would be exactly the same as if I opened the computer and took out one of the hard drives. The only difference is there's no way to connect the cable wrong because everything is in a fixed position.

bigrigdriver, did you go offline? Anyone know whether what I reported last changes any recommendations?

Is the advice still the same?

As a relative newbie, I need to get the terms straight. Should I have the Ubuntu hard disk in the machine but boot into the Live CD? I'm not sure what is meant by "don't mount it". If I'm booting from the CD, I'm not in Ubuntu, right?

Anyone able to give specific instructions?

Well for some reason your PC is not able to access the disk drive
with Linux on it. For some unknown reason this hard disk has
become corrupted.
You can install the hard disk drive and then boot from a CD.
This may enable you to access the the Ubuntu hard disk drive
and recover files from it. If it doesn't then post again.