Boot fails into Busybox, Feisty

[Richard S. Crawford]

On Tuesday 27 March 2007 12:08:23 Richard S. Crawford wrote:
> 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?

Other errors which have cropped up:

Prior to the "Begin: waiting for root filsystem... ..." line, I get these 
messages:

Begin: Assembling all MD arrays ...
mdadm: No devices listed in conf file were found
Failure: failed to assemble all arrays

I found this thread on the Ubuntu forums which seemed to address this issue 
and had some workarounds:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=216039&highlight=Begin%3A+Waiting+for+root+file+system

However, this did not work.  The fact that I was able to mount /dev/hda1 when 
I booted from the LiveCD and attempt to modify /boot/grub/menu.lst, as well 
as the fact that I got the grub menu on boot when I booted without the 
LiveCD, indicates to me that the hard drive and filesystem are probably fine 
after all.

Still looking for some help.


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