[NBLUG/talk] Problems booting Ubuntu 8.10 after maintenance

Steve Bursch sbursch at sonic.net
Tue Feb 24 13:48:47 PST 2009


>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

I got the procedure to work a couple of times.  I was ecstatic to see the machine boot successfully, but most of the boot attempts would fail as before.  I've just now completed 5 attempts at rebooting using the "rootdelay=130" modification, and none of them succeeded.  Since changes made to the Grub menu at boot time are not permanent, I have to use the procedure every time I boot the machine.  It's unclear if making the changes permanent would help much anyway, since the addition of the "rootdelay=130" option only works some of the time.  I'm pleased that it worked at all, however, since it gives me confidence that my system is still intact.  But I'm concerned about the intermittence of the problem.  To me, that may be suggestive of a hardware malfunction, perhaps the hard drive starting to fail.

Do you have any opinions about the intermittence?  Am I correct to be concerned that my system may be having a HD failure?

---Steve






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