After installing Kubuntu Gutsy I found that I'd made the root partition too small for the additional apps I wanted to install so I backed up the contents oh my home and root partitions to a second disk and resized the partitions. The files copied back OK but now when I boot it just (eventually) drops me into a BusyBox shell. I was hoping I could copy back the contents of my root and no have to reinstall everything from scratch again. I checked the live CD and there doesn't seem to be any repair install utility. Is there any way I can get around having to reinstall the system and all my apps again? I was hoping there may just be one or two files that hadn't copied over that may fix it?

How did you resize - did it involve re-making the filesystems ???.
With a bit of luck should be just a UUID mismatch - select "Recovery Mode" from the boot menu, and have a look at the messages.

I didn't think the UUID would cause problems but it looks like that's it, here's the relevant output:

Check root = bootarg cat /proc/cmdline
or missing modules, devices: cat /proc/modules ls /dev
ALERT! /dev/disk/by-uuid/62322ba8-1af4-4c15-8359-2cc45e52a24f does not exist. Dropping to a shell!

does anyone know how I can correct this?

Personally I'd just go back to using physical device designation (/dev/sda1 ... whatever), but you should be able to find the UUID under /dev/disk/
Else, the various filesystems have commands that will display it - for swap, just do a mkswap and note the result.

I cded to /dev/disks did an ls and there are 3 entries there, I did a mv ./existing-uuid ./my-uuid to see if I could rename a existing one but that didn't work. I also tried the same thing with cp but that gave an error saying there's not enough disk space (what do these things contain? I had 2GB free on my root partition). For some reason I couldn't see the disks directory in a file manager (tried dolphin and konqueror) so I'm going to have to try to do it all from a command line. Syg00, what did you mean by I don't get what you mean, this problem isn't affecting the way I access my disks, it's stopping the system from booting.

Anyone got any more suggestions before I just give up and reinstall everything from scratch?

Newer ubuntus refer to disks with this by-uuid thingy. I hate it.
Anyway, your disk ID has changed, so the system can no longer find it. What syg00 is saying is that you can go back to the "old" way of naming disks eg /dev/sda1 or /dev/hda1 and this should work.
So, boot grub. Press e to edit. Find the line that is referring to your root partition, it'll be something like
Change that stupid string to /dev/whatever like this:
Obviously your root partition may not be /dev/sda1, but only you know which partition of which disk it is on
Press return.
You should boot OK.
Now fix up /boot/grub/menu.lst so it is automatic next time.

Thanks for explaining that Tredegar I tried it but it didn't make any difference. I also tried appending root=/dev/sda1 to the recovery mode option but I only got the same thing.

Exactly the same thing? (What is this, Eg. being dumped to a busybox shell with exactly the same error message?)

You cannot append it, you have to replace it. You do not want any references to 62322ba8-1af4-4c15-8359-2cc45e52a24f at all because that no longer exists. That partition got given a new number when you repartitioned. So it isn't found. So all is broken.

Are you sure that /dev/sda1 is your root partition? If you are dual-booting it is probably your windows partition.
The curent partition uuid numbers will be listed in /dev/disk/by-uuid. If you can do a ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid you should see that these are just links pointing to /dev/hd?x or /dev/sd?x
The red bits may have to be changed for your particular setup. Please tell us the output of ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid

Serious Uncertainty: Are you booting to "recovery" from grub (from your hdd) or your install CD?

The bottom line is this:
/boot/grub/menu.lst is referring to a by-uuid disk that does not match. So it will not work. We either have to find the right uuid for your root partition, or refer to it in the "old" way. See above. Then get back here

yep 'fraid so.

I tried:
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.15-29-386 root=/dev/sda1 ro quiet
from GRUB but I'd swear it did the same thing?

[scarcasm]can you run that by me again, I'm still not quite sure what you're trying to tell me. Should I blast the UUID with a nuclear warhead or just threaten to throw it off a tall building? [/scarcasm]
yes, I even checked by looking in the system settings of my Gutsy LiveCD.

Anyway I edited the menu.lst file from a liveCD and it seems to work. Thanks everyone for your help.

tredegar, thank you very much.

Today I deleted two old linux installations with gparted live, and after restarting, I could not boot Ubuntu
I replaced numbers with /dev/sda5, and it worked

Pleased it worked for you.
Welcome to LQ!

Hi,

I m also experiencing the same issue. I did what was asked, which is to update the grub config from the uuid to the actual path value.

It did work for the first time. Once inside UBUNTU, went to the menu.lst and updated the value to path as mentioned.

Then I did a restart. It didnt work. I tried for every number ranging from 1 to 7 for the /dev/sdaX. Still I get drop off to the busy box empty screen.

I ve noticed this when I was at the grub screen
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.22-14-generic root=/dev/sda1 ro quiet
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.22-14-generic
quite

Do I need to update root (hd0,1) whenever I change the value in /dev/sdaX?

Appreciate the advice.

Maybe it needs to look like this:

I had a similar problem on my friends laptop.


Turned out to be a journal error. I ended up running

sudo fsck /dev/sda1

while booted on the live cd. This found one error and repaired
ext3 journal.

I was trying to mount the drive on the live cd and was unable.
I used < dmesg | tail >, as the error message stated to realize
there was a problem with the journal.

Remember not to be using your HDD while you're in transit.
Better to get a SSD if you plan to use your laptop like that.