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After a power outage (unplanned shutdown), attempts to reboot Ubuntu Studio 14.04 are greeted with the subject line. Additional lines include;

CPU: 7 PID 1 Comm: run-init Not tainted 3.13.0-52-lowlatency #86-Ubuntu

and 

drm_kms_helper: panic occurred, switching back to text console

/boot is likely full, as I received a package failure during an update earlier in the day, and there are several (5) kernel versions available from the grub menu.

I can launch into those several different versions, but all unsuccessfully, including the recovery modes.

I've looked around for similar problems, though most other related issues seem quite variant, such as for VMs, FAI, or new installs.

What should I try next?

Will
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2 Answers2

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Have the same exact error on a friend's Ubuntu system that was on an outlet controlled by a light switch and powered off as such. Bad design as you can imagine, but that's literally how they turned off their computer. Long story short, the error you're seeing is possibly just the tip of the iceberg. In other words, after mounting and attempting to navigate around the drive (i.e. /home) you may start hitting Could not ls: Input/output error, etc.

Their's is an 80 GB HDD and I've already begin using PhotoRec which is pretty effective when it comes to images (not so much with *.mp4, *.mov, etc). Tried e2fsck without much success, just a large lost+found directory with missing files, and errors remaining in an attempt to fix the partitions but to no avail.

At this point I'm not too hopeful that I'll be able to "revert" the system to a usable/bootable state, but I did want to mention some data recovery tools in the event your system is beyond a simple e2fsck repair.

There is also TestDisk which comes from the same vendor as PhotoRec and claims to be able to fix partition tables. I have not actually tried it yet, but it does come on the Ubuntu Rescue Remix Live CD. I was able to locate an ISO here as their main site is currently throwing a HTTP 500.

Also wanted to mention that Ubuntu Rescue Remix comes with ddrescue which I incidentally jumped to prior to learning that conventional dd imaging does not work for the same reason (Input/output error reading /dev/sda). I can't get more than 5 MB before dd quits on me, where as ddrescue is able to skip unreadable blocks and dump the entire partition, implying data loss of course.

Matt Borja
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Sorry for posting this as an answer, but the comment section doesn't provide enough flexibility for this.

  1. If you have the original installation DVD still lying around, boot that and back up the readable data from that HDD ASAHP.

  2. Only then use any recovery software to try to recover your data directly.

  3. If that fails, reinstall...

And if you can afford it: ddrescue the failing disk onto a new one and do the recovery on the copy

Community
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Fabby
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  • It appears that reinstall is the answer... – Will Jan 13 '16 at 01:14
  • @Will As you've never accepted an answer on this site before: If this answer helped you, don't forget to click the grey ☑ at the left of this text, which means Yes, this answer is valid! ;-) (And sorry to hear that you had to reinstall everything: keep an eye out for bad sectors with badblocks -s /dev/XdY) – Fabby Jan 13 '16 at 11:25