My brother's 16.04 system froze during normal use. After a hard shutdown the GRUB rescue prompt 'Minimal BASH-like line editing is supported...' appeared and it wouldn't boot into Ubuntu. This system does not dual boot Ubuntu and Windows.
My first attempt to fix it was to follow the guides at https://itsfoss.com/fix-minimal-bash-line-editing-supported-grub-error-linux/ and https://www.howtogeek.com/114884/how-to-repair-grub2-when-ubuntu-wont-boot/ and boot to a live USB drive and install boot-repair. However, every time I ran boot-repair it got stuck in a loop saying that File system repair requires to unmount partitions.
The second guide indicated a manual way to repair GRUB that I tried next. It involved identifying the Ubuntu partition with sudo fdisk -l (which I identified to be /dev/sda2) and manually mounting that partition with sudo mount /dev/sda2 /mnt. This resulted in a message stating:
mount: mount /dev/sda2 on /mnt failed: Structure needs cleaning
My Googling seemed to indicate that this was a filesystem corruption issue. I backed up the entire /dev/sda drive to a zip file on a USB drive using sudo dd if=/dev/sda | bzip2 > /media/usb/image.bz2 before running sudo fsck /dev/sda2.
This resulted in lots of errors, including:
Corrupt group descriptor: bad block for block bitmap,
Group descriptors look bad... trying backup blocks...,
Block bitmap for group 0 is not in group, and
lots of 'Inode table for group 0 is not in group.
WARNING: SEVERE DATA LOSS IS POSSIBLE'.
At the bottom of the output was
/dev/sda2: ***** WARNING: Filesystem still has errors *****.
Despite my best efforts and many hours of Googling and troubleshooting, the system is no closer to booting than when I started. Can anyone point me in the right direction?
Thank you,
Parker
