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Out of the blue, my Dell Inspiron laptop has stopped booting.

  • If I try to start it normally, it stops after a short while with "initramfs" as command prompt.
  • If I try to start it in recovery mode, it reports a failure while checking the root file system, and then I get the command prompt with "initramfs".
  • If I try to boot it from a USB-stick with ubuntu on it, it fails and I get "grub" as command prompt. The USB-stick works fine on another laptop.

I am not a computer specialist. I am willing to learn, and I have tried to find information on various forums, but I have discovered I was really out of my depth. Could someone help me or at least point me in the right direction? Thanks in advance.

David Cloutier
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1 Answers1

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The solution was provided by Paul Benson in the comments. Thank you very much, Paul! (And thanks to sudodus for pointing to a useful thread to deal with the bootable USB-stick problem). I'm writing out the solution here to make it clear that the problem is solved as far as I am concerned.

The procedure is documented at the following link: https://medium.com/@aterro51/linux-how-to-fix-linux-mint-initramfs-prompt-at-boot-a6bced4fe49f. The error messages I received indicated that there was a problem with the root file system which prevented the computer from booting.

At the initramfs prompt, I first had to type the following:

(initramfs) exit

This command was useful to get the path of the root file system, which was displayed in one of the output lines:

The root filesystem on [path] requires a manual fsck

The next command fixed the problem with the root file system:

(initramfs) fsck [path] -y

After that, I only needed to reboot.

(initramfs) reboot

David Cloutier
  • 21