[NBLUG/talk] Problems booting Ubuntu 8.10 after maintenance

[Aaron Grattafiori]

Steve-

First you should backup your important data if you haven't already.
... you do normal backups right? ;-P

Hard to be sure about HD failure... There are signs though:
How old is your drive? How hot does it feel to the touch?
Has your disk access seemed slow lately? is it making noise? 
Have you had any other "weird" things happen in the past few weeks?

Try removing the quiet and splash options so that you can see exactly
whats happening. Is it still having the UUID errors? Did you try what
Kyle said?

If you want to check your hard drive, you can boot into a LiveCD and do
an fsck on your drive (be sure it didn't auto mount!). 
If you don't know if its /dev/hda or sda or whatnot.. just try 
catting: /proc/partitions

Also: dmesg will report I/O errors with hardware, keep and eye on it when
using your hard drive to see if its complaining.

good luck,

-Aaron

On 13:48 Tue 24 Feb     , Steve Bursch wrote:
> 
> >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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