Problem booting all of the sudden

[dlausevic]

As of this evening, everything was running peachy. I shutdown properly, as usual, and went out to dinner. I came back and she won't boot very far. Currently, I'm running the most up to date Kubuntu 6.06.1 LTS. I copied down what it says on screen.

Uncompressing Linux... Ok booting the kernel.
mount: Mounting /dev/hda1 on /root failed: No such device
mount: Mounting /root/dev on /dev .static/dev failed: No such directory...
mount: Mounting /sys on /root/sys failed: No such directory
mount: Mounting /proc on /root/proc failed: No such directory
Target file system doesn't have /sbin/init


Then busybox loads. But then

/bin/sh: can't access tty; job control turned off
#

So, from here I have nothing to do but restart the computer, but it won't go beyond this.

I do have a number of live discs available to troubleshoot. I really need assistance on this as it is a production computer and alot of work is on there. I hope I can recover from this.

Thank you all in advance.

[saikee]

When you see the Grub menu do not select a system to boot. Just press the "c" key and this will drop you into a Grub prompt.

You could investiagte the PC while you are in a Grub prompt. For example this command will show all the partitions in the 1st hard disk

geometry (hd0)

If hda1, which should be the 0 partition of the 1st disk (hd0), is not available then it should show up.

The hard disk some times may play game with the owner to refuse to boot on one power up but behaves normally in another power up.

Another possibility is if the kernel has been updated then the newer kernel may call hda1 as sda1. In such a case you need to reconfigure the menu.lst and fstab.

[dlausevic]

Okay, I did as you suggested and the geometry does point hda1 at 0 (or whatever the terminology is). I booted into live and captured the output for menu.lst. I can't find anything wrong, but maybe someone may find something.
menu.lst
Here is my fstab file.
fdisk -l on hda is here.
Here are a few other various outputs.

I certainly hope I can get this resolved soon. I have a long proof to complete before Monday. Thanks again.

[saikee]

Your menu.lst shows us that there are 8 choices of booting your Ubuntu. Have you tried the other 7 alternatives?

It is possible that Grub may be corrupted slightly because device hda1 does exists, right?

You can restore Grub as follow

When you see the booting screen press "Esc" quickly and then the "c" key. This should drop you into a Grub prompt. Grub can be restored in a Grub prompt by commands

root (hd0,0)
setup (hd0)

Thereafter it will boot by command

chainloader (hd0)+1
boot

If you can't manage to get the Grub prompt put a "#" infront of Line 22 in the "hiddenmenu". This will disables the hiddenmenu command. Also adding a few "0" after the timeout statement will elongate the time you can decide which system to boot.

Original part of your menu.lst

timeout         3

## hiddenmenu
# Hides the menu by default (press ESC to see the menu)
hiddenmenu

Suggested changes in red

timeout         300

## hiddenmenu
# Hides the menu by default (press ESC to see the menu)
#hiddenmenu

All lines with a # in the front is ignored by Grub (no executed).