Ubuntu on Lenovo x61s - Help needed

[Brandon Vincent]

On Sun, Sep 6, 2015 at 12:27 AM, Peter <petergoggin at bigpond.com> wrote:
> How do I procede? Does this mean the dis has failed?

When Ubuntu boots straight to BusyBox (the initramfs) under normal
conditions, this means that it was unable to locate a suitable root
partition to switch_root to.

Personally, I'd do the following,

Backup the data which you believe is important. I believe Karl gave
some instructions to do this with dd(1). Once completed, you are going
to want to check if the hard drive was the cause of the problem. If
the drive is starting to exhibit uncorrectable bad sectors, it will
fail a SMART short test.

smartctl --test=short /dev/sda
smartctl -a /dev/sda

Make sure that the second command returns "Completed without error"
for the last "Short offline" test.

If the drive isn't going bad, it's more likely that you've somehow
damaged the filesystem which rests on top of the LUKS volume.

Mount the encrypted volume:

sudo cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda5 root

Then check the filesystem:

sudo fsck /dev/mapper/root

Brandon Vincent