Boot fails into Busybox, Feisty

[Richard S. Crawford]

After installing a bunch of updates to my Feisty Herd 5 box, my computer has 
suddenly decided to stop booting.  When I attempt to boot into safe mode, it 
gets as far as this:

Begin: waiting for root filesystem... ...
[   45.256317] Floppy drives(s): fd0 is 1.44M
[   45.283740] FDC 0 is a post-1991 82077


After a few minutes, these messages appear:

Done.
	Check root= bootarg cat /proc/cmdline
	or missing modules, devices: cat /proc/modules ls /dev
ALERT! /dev/disk/by-uuid/ad90f690-8d66-41cf-9885-f821c5ae9918 does not exist. 
Dropping to a shell!

BusyBox v1.1.3 (Debian 1:1.1.3-3ubuntu3) Built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands

/bin/sh: can't access tty; job control turned off
(initramfs)


I booted from a Kubuntu Dapper LiveCD and entered a shell and attempted to 
fsck the hard drive:

$ sudo fsck /dev/hda1

It recovered several inode entries, but I am still unable to boot normally.

So what can I do?  Is my hard drive hosed?  If not, how can I get past BusyBox 
to get to my OS?


-- 
Richard S. Crawford (http://www.mossroot.com)
"That which does not kill me makes me stranger."
    -Llewellyn, from Ozy & Millie