[NBLUG/talk] Problems booting Ubuntu 8.10 after maintenance

[Kyle Rankin]

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.
> 
> Any thoughts or ideas?
> 
> Thanks in advance....Steve
> 
> 

Shouldn't have to start over, but basically it looks like you set up some
sort of new partition or root device or something along those lines caused
the UUID of your root device to change. In the busybox shell do an ls -l
/dev/disk/by-uuid/ to see how your ordinary dev entries map to UUIDs. Then
check /boot/grub/menu.lst and /etc/fstab and make sure the parts in those
files that reference a UUID reference the right one.

-- 
Kyle Rankin
NBLUG President
The North Bay Linux Users' Group
http://nblug.org
IRC: greenfly at irc.freenode.net #nblug 
kyle at nblug.org