Dropping into text mode during boot

[Colin Law]

Hi

I noticed the other day that one of my machines, running Jaunty
standard install and all up to date, is dropping into text mode during
boot.  It starts ok with the oscillating yellow blob on the orange
line but then drops into text mode, with the first line showing "*
Reading files needed to boot".  It carries on showing loads of stuff
then displays the graphical login screen and behaves perfectly
thereafter.  I don't remember doing anything other than routine
updates.

I have googled and found nothing that seemed to correspond to my
problem (I did find a suggestion that this could happen if the swap
partition uuid was not the same in fstab and initramfs resume file,
but I have checked and these are ok).

I have looked in various log files but cannot see anything untoward,
but to be honest I am not sure what I am looking for (or where I
should look for that matter).

Any help would be much appreciated.

Colin