System won't boot.

[Bruce Pieterse]

On Tue 18 Oct 2011 18:21:38 SAST, Chris Davis wrote:
> I sat down at my system yesterday, and had no network access of any 
> kind, and it seemed that my local disk access was ok. I did some basic 
> looking around, and figured I'd boot the system before expending much 
> more energy on troubleshooting. (There was a pending reboot in any case.)
>
> Well, when I rebooted I got the following error. Any ideas?
>
> init: hwclock main process (246) killed by SEGV signal 7b6ca88
> init: plymouth main process (248) killed by BUS signal
> exec: 14: mountall: Input/output error
> init: mountall main process (252) terminated with status 2
> init: Failed to spawn console-setup main process: unable to execute: 
> input/output error
> init: plymouth-stop pre-start process (255) terminated with status 2
> Filesysem check or mount failed.
> A maintenance shell will now be started.
> CONTROL-D will terminate this shell and continue booting after re-trying
> filesystems. Any further errors will be ignored
> /proc/self/fd/8: 20: /sbin/sulogin: Input/output error
> init: mountall-shell main process (256) terminated with status 2
> exec: 10: start: Input/output error
> init: mountall-shell post-stop process (258) terminated with status 2
>
> I can't escape back to the boot process, the machine is effectively 
> dead. Apparently there must be something wrong with the OS since it 
> fails the fsck or the mounting of the drive. At least that's what it 
> appears to me. Any ideas about 1) recovering and rebooting the drive? 
> 2) mounting it on another system and pulling the data I need off to an 
> outboard drive?
>
> Thanks.
> Chris
>
>

Hi Chris,

I'm not sure if this has been resolved already or not. I would 
recommend booting from a live CD and try running fsck on the disk that 
has the installation. If you need help there, I'll be glad to assist. 
Take note that it would be better if you had another distro you can 
boot from preferably debian or fedora, because of ubuntu's nature of 
trying to auto-mount devices when starting up.

-- 
Best of luck,

Bruce