My computer wont boot normally. I have Ubuntu 8.04 installed. This has happen the last 2 days: I accidentally lost files on my USB-disk and I installed everything I thought could help me recover from that ext3 disk. The problem is fixed now, but a new one: My computer wont boot normally, I have to use root password or Ctr-D to start login window.

Here are messages:

*
.
* Activating SWAP [OK]
* Checking root file-system
1214
fsck 1.40.8 (13-Mar-2008)
/dev/sda1: clean, 2090351/4185824 files 4379371/18729774 blocks [OK]
* checking file systems...
1214
/dev/sda1 is mounted. e2fsck: cannot continue,aborting.
fsck died with status 8

When I try to run fsck from live-cd it says cant find ext2 file system. Thats right, I have ext3 from default install.
Can anyone please help?

Hi -

Search around the Ubuntu forums and you should probably find a few links that can help you with the exact steps you need to do.

But this link describes what I believe the problem might be:

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-291890.html

These links might also help:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=544183
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-859779.html

The short version is that your /etc/fstab (system file systems table) has become "corrupt" (at least from Ubuntu 8's perspective: newer versions of Ubuntu need special "UUID's").

'Hope that helps .. PSM

I perform filechk from live-CD. It went seemingly OK, but after that my computer didn't boot at all. It stopped at boot, on the usual brown Ubuntu splash screen. The brown horizontal line that goes across the screen during boot stopped and nothing happen. In stead of using more time and days on this problem I reinstalled Ubuntu. If this was caused by an error in Ubuntu there is a big error somewhere. I did nothing wrong only installed some programs to recover lost files. ddrescue and foremost and maybe more. I did make to recover, but the computer didnt function after.
P.S. It was an external ext3-disk that needed recovery.

Thanks for your help