[NBLUG/talk] Problems booting Ubuntu 8.10 after maintenance

[Troy Arnold]

On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 10:03:53AM -0800, Steve Bursch wrote:
> I have a machine that is running Ubuntu 8.10 Desktop.  I don't use it
> very often, but I do apply all of the outstanding maintenance about every
> 2 weeks.  The last time I applied maintenance, it seemed to go on just
> fine, but upon rebooting, the machine failed to restart.  For about 5
> minutes or so, the screen shows the Ubuntu name and logo, and the orange
> bar that moves back and forth.  Later, I receive the following messages
> on my display:
> 
> Starting up...  Loading, please wait...  Check root=bootarg cat
> /proc/cmdline or missing modules, devices: cat/proc/modules  ls /dev
> 
> ALERT! /dev/disk//by-uuid/d4d587ec-89ed-4b73-9abd-42ccb27a204e does not
> exist.  Dropping to shell!
> 
> BusyBox v1.1.3 (Debian 1:1.1.3-5ubuntu12) Built-in shell (ash) Enter
> 'help' for a list of built-in commands.  (initramfs) _
> 
> 
> I'm guessing that my system is hosed and that I need to start over and
> reinstall Ubuntu.  But before doing that, however, I thought I would
> check and see if anyone has seen this problem before, or if anyone has
> any less drastic way of recovering.

You certainly should not have to start over.  The system is most likely
intact, but just unable to find the root partition at boot time.  It's
unlikely also that the drive's id would have changed...

[googles]

Hmm. try this:
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-987243.html

"How about when you get the Grub menu on start up, select the first Ubuntu
kernel entry, press "e" to edit it, select the "kernel" line, press "e" to
edit it, and at the end of the kernel line add "rootdelay=130"

Any luck with that?

-t