I have installed Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn friday and spent the week-end getting familiar with the OS, downloading upgrades and new applications for my needs. It is running on an Acer machine, a Sempron 1.8ghz with 512mb RAM. Since the PC came with Windows Vista, I wanted to set up a dual boot environment in case I need something. I was booting into Ubuntu without problems for the whole week-end, then yesterday I wanted to test whether Windows was working OK (hadn't tried to boot into it since I had Ubuntu installed). Everything was fine. Then I rebooted to go into Ubuntu. My GRUB menu showed many entries, as usual, like (recalling from memory)
Ubuntu 6.0.20.16
Ubuntu 6.0.20.16 (Recovery)
Ubuntu 6.0.20.15
Ubuntu 6.0.20.15 (Recovery)
Windows Vista/LongHorn
Windows XP

Out of curiosity I tried the Windows XP. It took me to a tool created by Acer and included in their laptop, a sort of "recovery mode", which I assume they put on a separate partition with the bare basis of WinXP files required for their tool to work. Seeing that, I quit their tool without doing anything.
When I rebooted I got this message after selecting, as usual, the first option in my menu, Ubuntu 6.0.20.16 (my numbers are probably off). All was well, so I did usual stuff (email, showing photos to friends), and put the computer on suspend.

When I came back this morning, I resumed the session but everything was slown down to a crawl. Since I didn't know the keyboard command to open the system activity monitor and couldn't manage to click my way through "system" and stuff, I held the reset button on my pc to power it off. When I turned it back on, I got my usual boot menu and chose the same option as before. Instead of booting in Linux, I got this message:
And then a prompt on initramfs. Not knowing what to do, I rebooted using the reboot command (I believe, I may have hit ctrl+alt+del though). Next when I booted I didn't even get the boot menu, only the following:
And it's just frozen there. Everytime I restart my PC, I get this, so I cannot boot neither Ubuntu, Ubuntu recovery, or Windows Vista.

So I dug out the Ubuntu Live CD and booted from it, and I searched the web all morning and did the following stuff. I am not sure what to make of this.

1)sudo fdisk -l returns the following:
2) Visually in GNOME Partition Editor, I see my partitions lined up. First time I booted there were 2 partitions flagged as Boot, sda2 (mountpoint /media/ACER, which is the folder in which Windows is I believe. It is a 20GB partition), and sda5 (mountpoint none, 72GB, which is my linux partition). I cannot mount the sda5 partition, which I think is the problem in all this.

My question is: is it a problem that my partition sda4 is an extended partition, in which there is sda5 which is my linux partition, and sda6 whcih is the linux swap partition? Should the linux partition have its own (physical) partition? And which one should I flag as Boot? Partition 5 which is the linux, or partition 4 which is the extended partition containing both the linux (sda5) and swap (sda6) partitions?

The message I get when I try to mount the linux partition is:
Any help would be greatly appreciated, as I cannot use my pc at all in the moment !! Thanks!

GRUB error 2 is probably associated with GRUB being unable to open its config. file. From the sequence of events, it seems possible that this file got glitched. This would be consistent with the error you got when attempting to mount the Linux partition.

The partition table is fine--Linux does not use the "boot" flag.

The simplest thing might be to re-install Ubuntu, but with all your work, I'm sure that sounds unattractive.

You can try to troubleshoot by first running fsck on the Ubuntu partition, and then trying to access the Grub config. file (/boot/grub/menu.lst) From the live CD, do this as follows:
See the link below on booting--it includes a link to the GRUB manual.
Also, post the contents of menu.lst (without all the lines beginning with "#"

Although i'm not comfortable with your fdisk -l output but knows that its not the problem keeping linux into extended partition.
Its perfectly right that sda5(linux) and sda6(swap) are logical drives inside the extended partition sda4.
sda5 should be the mount point in your case (not sda4).
hopefully someone else will give you the exact solution for your problem.

regards

Thank you for the help.

I typed the first commands (adding "sudo" in front since I would otherwise get "cannot create directory 'ubuntu': Permission denied"). When I type "sudo mount /dev/sda5 ubuntu" from the /mnt $ prompt, I get
...

If I try to mount my extended partition (sda4) containing sda5, I get
"mount: you must specify the filesystem type"

I tried to launch a "dmesg ! tail" to see if I would get "useful info". It sent back over a hundred lines of code, which I can't copy here. To the best of my knowledge, everything looks normal, except when I get to this part:
These two messages are repeated, intersticed throughout a lot more lines:
The rest is a succession of EXT3-fs error: Block bitmap not in group, group descriptors corrupted! and "Option utf8 is no longer supported", each of them repeated once for each other partition (device sda1, device sda5, device sda2).

I am beginning to panic here. Is there a solution anymore?

You are getting messages indicating that the Linux partition is indeed glitched. Go back and try fsck, as I suggested.

Note that you cannot mount an extended partition, so don't worry about that part.

I can't do what you've posted above, since "sudo mount /dev/sda5 ubuntu" returns the error I mentioned above. Typing "fsck /sda5" returns And then typing "e2fsck -b 8193 /sda5" returns the very same error message as typing "fsck /sda5".

Am I not executing a command as I should? Or is the problem deeper and I'm looking at a complete reinstall? If I do have to resort to that, then I think I'll completely scrap Windows and just have Linux on.

fsck /dev/sda5

See "man fsck"---anytime a command wants the "device name", it will be /dev/something

Hurray! I could successfully mount and check the menu.lst file. Although it's a little weird; when running fsck, I ran into several "Block size is 377373. Should be 0. Fix? (Y/N)"-type messages, and answered Y to all of them, and then at about 65% or so the program froze and I couldn't do anything. I hard-rebooted (holding the reset button the PC's case) and then things were different, and okay somewhat. Should I run fsck again in case it hasn't completely done its job? Now when I boot I get into the GRUB menu, and then get the "can't access tty: job control turned off" message whichever Linux I choose to boot. It's still a step forward though

Here is the menu.lst content:

Update. I tried replacing the "kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.20-16-generic root=UUID=372023de-2e2d-43d8-b8a
0-1aa7b6ffc59c ro quiet splash" with "kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.20-16-generic root=/dev/sda5 ro quiet splash". No progress, still getting the "can't access tty; job control turned off" error.

Any last resort solution I can try? Or any advice on how I should reformat and repartition everything if I'm looking at a complete reinstall?

End of topic. I completely reformatted and got Windows out. Everything works fine since. If someone ever gets a similar issue, though, I think it could have been resolved using the Super GRUB disk. Google it up and try it.