Strange problem fixed itself with 2 reboots - Explanation?

[Alan McKinnon]

On Friday 26 May 2006 10:58, Chris Neary wrote:
> Recently my Ubuntu Breezy desktop just hung in the 'dissolve'
> XScreensaver, and wouldn't respond. So I did the inevitable hard
> power-off and restart.
>
> When the box came back up, it just landed on a text prompt unlike
> my customised Bash shell: It said there was a problem mounting
> /dev/hda1 on /root which caused other problems later like it not
> being able to find '/sbin/init'.
>
> Most of the programs were unavailable - in fact I think I just had
> a strange shell (ash?) with it's built-in commands. There was also
> a message about not being able to start Bash because 'job control'
> was turned off, or something like that.
>
> So anyway, one more restart later and it works fine. Perfect!
>
> What was all that about? Should I back up my hard drive to be sure
> in case it's a sign of it dying? It's less than a year old! (80GB
> Western Digital WD800). It's not making clicking noises yet though,
> so I'm doubtful of that.

Random faults like that are horrible to diagnose. The prompt you got 
is to be expected if there is a problem mounting /

Is this a notebook or a desktop machine? Odds are that the cause is on 
the hardware side, even more so if it's a notebook. Most likely is 
bad electrical connections - plug out and replug all connectors 
especially power, disks and RAM chips then see if you can reproduce 
it.

-- 
If only me, you and dead people understand hex, 
how many people understand hex?

Alan McKinnon
alan at linuxholdings dot co dot za
+27 82, double three seven, one nine three five