29

I attempted to upgrade from Ubuntu 13.04 to 13.10 today, and mid upgrade the system started flaking out, and eventually locked up entirely. I was forced to restart the computer, and am now unable to get the computer to boot up at all.

When I boot currently, it takes me to the GRUB menu, and I can choose to boot normally, or boot in an older version. I have tried several things, which I list below, but no matter what, when I try to finish booting into Ubuntu, I receive the following error:

Filesystem check or mount failed. A maintenance shell will now be
started. CONTROL-D will terminate this shell and continue booting
after re-trying filesystems. Any further errors will be ignored
root@ubuntu-computername:~#

I have fun fsck -f and everything appears correct, no errors are reported. and it passes all 5 checks.

If I run fdisk -l then I get the following information:

Disk /dev/sda: 320.1 GB, 320072933376 bytes 255 heads, 63
sectors/track, 38913 cylinders, total 625142448 sectors Units =
sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 4096
bytes / 4096 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00010824

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System 
/dev/sda1 * 2048 608456703 304227328 83 Linux 
/dev/sda2   608458750 625141759 8341505 5 Extended Partition 2 does not start on physical sector boundary. 
/dev/sda5  608458752 625141759 8341504 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Disk /dev/sdb: 320.1 GB, 320072933376 bytes 255 heads, 63
sectors/track, 38913 cylinders, total 625142448 sectors Units =
sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512
bytes / 4096 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0fb4b7e8

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1   8192 625139711 312565760 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT

I am considering just installing a new OS on the other disk, that currently has nothing on it, and then just attempting to scrape my data off the old disk (thankfully I didn't encrypt the files).

Really my question is this: Can I salvage this Ubuntu install, or should I give up and just reinstall?

Braiam
  • 67,791
  • 32
  • 179
  • 269
SamHuckaby
  • 393
  • 1
  • 3
  • 7
  • Part of the problem is that you're not actually giving us any logs of the real problem with that machine. You're just showing us one of the symptoms. How about the output of the boot process for starters? – Magellan Oct 18 '13 at 18:57
  • I'm not sure what you mean, I never get any output on boot other than what I posted in my first quotation. –  Oct 18 '13 at 19:19
  • When troubleshooting Ubuntu, turning the splash screen off from the Grub prompt would be a good idea. – Magellan Oct 18 '13 at 19:52
  • Sam, press {Esc} when the splash screen appears to disable it and then you will see all the crunchy bits Magellan wants in his second request. More detail on that at http://askubuntu.com/questions/33416/how-do-i-disable-the-boot-splash-screen – K7AAY Oct 18 '13 at 20:18
  • And, to replay the crunchy bits after the fact, do dmesg or save it to a file to post on Google Docs with dmesg > thebootfile.txt - then set the Google Docs file as visible to all and then post the link to it here. I say that because I don't know if you have attachment privileges here, and it's gonna be a humungous file. – K7AAY Oct 18 '13 at 20:23
  • 3
    I faced the same problem (after upgrading from 13.4 to 13.10 64bit). My /var/log/upstart/mountall.log told me that /etc/default/rcS was missing. Thus I remounted my root partition with write enabled ( mount -o remount,rw / ) and copied /etc/default/rcS.dpkg-new to /etc/default/rcS. Ubuntu 13.10 booted afterwards but is still corrupted. I will perform a clean reinstallation of 13.10, but maybe this hint helps anyone. –  Oct 19 '13 at 20:02
  • @user204862 You saved me a lot of hassle. Thanks for this hint. I was greeted with the very same error message today. And it also was the same cause. Thanks! – SeveQ Aug 03 '14 at 15:41

1 Answers1

43

I think I've sorted it thanks to a post I found here: Root filesystem check fails after power failure during installation.

Run from maintenance shell one line at a time:

mount -o remount,rw /
dpkg --configure -a
mount -o remount,ro /
sync
reboot

Worked for me but only got the first 2 lines and couldn't do the rest as drive was busy. Rebooted and it seems to be working now.

Community
  • 1
Patrick
  • 556
  • I also had to do mount /boot before that. – utapyngo Oct 22 '13 at 20:33
  • 1
    These instructions worked perfectly for me. Thanks for your help! I will note that I wasn't able to return the mount to read-only (line 3) as it said that my / was busy, but it let me sync and reboot, and now Ubuntu is working again. – SamHuckaby Oct 24 '13 at 14:34
  • You are my new hero. Like @SamHuckaby, I, too, could not run the third command (mount -o remount,ro /). I think the error was that the filesystem was busy? I continued with the next command, and the environment is happy. – Aren Cambre Nov 10 '13 at 04:54
  • Just confirming don't crap yourself if mount -o remount,ro / results in a filesystem busy error, because that's what happened to me. Skip it, run sync and reboot and everything should work fine. Thankyou Patrick, thankyou, thankyou. – Starkers Jan 09 '14 at 03:26
  • I'm experience the same exact problem, but running these commands didn't work. I get lots of errors with the dpkg command and when I try to reboot it gets stuck and after a while I get these:

    INFO task recovery-menu:639 blocked for more than 120 seconds "echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/hung_task_timeout_secs"

    INFO task S30killprocs:928 blocked for more than 120 seconds "echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/hung_task_timeout_secs"

     – Carlo Feb 03 '14 at 09:14
  • @CarloFeb see my edit – AncientSwordRage Feb 25 '14 at 21:06
  • Also experiencing same problem. 'Filesystem check or mount failed. A maintenance shell will now be started. CONTROL-D will terminate this shell and continue booting after re-trying filesystems. Any further errors will be ignored. Enter root password to continue maintenance.' Question: How do I get to maintenance shell stage? – angela Aug 14 '14 at 09:12
  • Got the same error message when updating 12.04 LTS to 14.04 LTS. Second mount failed as already mentioned, reboot just stayed stuck with loading screen forever, did a hard restart of pc, and seems to work now (on 14.04) – przno Aug 24 '14 at 16:08
  • Another very grateful "thank you"! I was pulling my hair out, until I found this thread. Cheers! – Ken Oct 29 '14 at 22:54