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Firstly, I'm new to askubuntu, so I don't know all the rules. secondly, im doing this from my phone, so forgive typos or errors. thirdly, I'm running Ubuntu Gnome 14.04. I'm not sure what else you may need to know, but please, tell me and I'll et the info for you.

So I was playing Rust on steam, and my net dropped out. I was getting up to go reset my modem and router, and fat fingered the sleep key. No big deal, I'll just wake it back up when I get back.

When I go to wake it up, it's locked on the login screen. No mouse, no keyboard, nothing. Wait a few to see if it responds, then hit the reset button on my tower. Reboots, then comes up to grub.

Strange, this isnt dual boot, it should Skipp right past grub as usual. I hit enter on the default option, Ubuntu. Then, it boots to the screen pictured below.

I don't have a live CD or USB,nor can I make one without this computer booting first. I dont have networking on the PC,clearly. All I have is my phone, and I ant seem to find any answers that would help me fix my problem.

Crappy phone quality picture of my problem... https://i.stack.imgur.com/VyFPk.jpg

Kristopher
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  • If you select advance options in grub, can you load an older kernel? – Delorean Jul 06 '16 at 04:35
  • No. I've attempted to load all of the available kernels, to no avail. – Kristopher Jul 06 '16 at 04:49
  • Are you able to load the recovery menu and root terminal? – Aaron Franke Jul 06 '16 at 05:55
  • Well. I was able to get to the grub prompt, and the initramfs prompt. However, I powered of last night so I could get some sleep, and now I can't even get a bios post message to show.... Edit: reset the CMOS and unplugged my secondary drive, got bios post, f2 and fixed primary boot device. Now I'm back to choosing either grub or initramfs prompt. – Kristopher Jul 06 '16 at 12:05
  • To answer your question, if I choose "advanced options for Ubuntu" in grub, then select the recovery menu option...I end up back at initramfs with almost the exact screen I posted in my original question. A lot of other errors scroll past to quickly for me to read though. – Kristopher Jul 06 '16 at 12:49
  • Do you have a friend where you could create a live USB/CD? In case you have a rooted Android phone you could look at the DriveDroid app...

    It seems that something with your boot partition filesystem has gone horribly wrong. Be very careful when trying to fix it. You really should somehow make a disk image of it first since trying to fix it might actually destroy data (see http://serverfault.com/questions/594372/loss-of-data-when-trying-to-fix-ext4-group-descriptors-corrupted). I'm pretty sure that this is a very rare case, but be careful.

     – Kai Jul 06 '16 at 16:23
  • Do you have a partition on a hard drive in your computer (or a USB drive) with more free space than the size of your boot partition? (I'm not sure how to find out from an initramfs prompt though - does anyone else know that?) – Kai Jul 06 '16 at 16:33
  • Got it. We can probably do pretty much what we want but it's not going to be fun (unless you enjoy using the command line). We could even try to create a bootable USB drive in the initramfs. May I ask you how much RAM your computer has? (Also, do you have LAN for your computer? I'm asking because we can totally use it in its current state to try to recover your system.) – Kai Jul 06 '16 at 16:55
  • I can try to find an Ethernet to use LAN. I have a secondary HDD that I can use if I absolutely need to partition it. I also have the original all 14.04 ISO on my ssd if it's needed. I have 16 gigs of ram.. – Kristopher Jul 06 '16 at 17:49
  • Great, so we don't need to find out how to set up a network connection and download the ISO into a ramdisk :D

    So in theory we could now try to locate the partition containing the 14.04 ISO on your SSD, mount the partition, insert a USB drive into your computer and copy the ISO to it. Do you have a USB drive with non-important data on it that we could completely overwrite (preferably a bit larger than 1GB)?

     – Kai Jul 06 '16 at 20:40
  • I have called my local PC repair man, and he's burning me a 16 gig live usb of Ubuntu gnome 14.04 that I'll pick up withing 24 hours. So that avoids the mess of mounting the iso, as well as gets me a live usb that I'll lock in a safe in case something else goes wrong later. If you'd like to post some directions as to where to start, I'd be greatful. I'm comfortable with command line and know my way around grub and live usb booting. – Kristopher Jul 06 '16 at 21:14
  • You should create a disk image of the partition containing your root file system (/dev/sdb1) first and save it to another drive (or the same drive, but that's a lot slower). (You can use e.g. GNOME Disks to find out the size of the partition and then you'll need to find a partition that's larger than /dev/sdb1 so that we can save the disk image there). Then you can mess around as you want with the partition safely, e.g. try running fsck /dev/sdb1. In case something goes wrong you should be able to restore the disk image and try again. (Just be careful with the dd if= and of= flags) – Kai Jul 07 '16 at 04:34
  • E.g. you could use dd if=/dev/sdb1 of=/path/to/folder/in/other/partition. In case you don't have any personal data on your root filesystem you could of course just reinstall everything, but you'll probably learn a lot more by trying to fix it :-) If you do have personal data on your drive but fsck fails to restore it you can have a look at photorec (there are great tutorials for using it) but finding the files can be quite a mess. Let's hope nothing goes wrong. – Kai Jul 07 '16 at 04:39
  • I dont have very much personal data, so I may just copy over any files, then wipe and start over. I hate how easily this installation keeps breaking lately. Seems like if I breathe at it wrong, something breaks. – Kristopher Jul 07 '16 at 12:42
  • If you have any files in your root partition I'm pretty sure you won't be able to copy them over just yet, you'll first need to somehow fix the filesystem (that's why your system fails to boot - it's not readable as usual and thus mount fails). But I'd still recommend to create an image of your root partition just in case fixing somehow goes wrong. When you said that your keyboard didn't work, did you also try magic sysrq combinations? (see e.g. https://fosswire.com/post/2007/09/fix-a-frozen-system-with-the-magic-sysrq-keys/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key) – Kai Jul 07 '16 at 15:27

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After having my local PC repair shop create a live usb of Ubuntu Gnome 14.04 64bit, and booting from there. I simply followed the directions from the answer in the link below. Took less than fifteen minutes, and I'm back up and running.

Boot drops to a (initramfs) prompts/busybox

Community
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Kristopher
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