Can't boot notebook at all anymore

[Colin Law]

On 24 June 2017 at 07:53, MR ZenWiz <mrzenwiz at gmail.com> wrote:
> Before it was just a problem with the SSD.  Now the notebook refuses
> to boot at all.
>
> It keeps coming up in busybox, but the more command doesn't wokr, or
> pieps don;t, so i can't peer through dmesg to see what's wrong.
>
> This is an ASUS N75SF that was running Xubuntu 16,04 just fine until
> this weekend.  (Last weekend it worked perfectly.  I even watched a
> couple of movies on it,  Now it has gone completely defective.)
>
> It was saying it couldn't find /sbin/init, and the best advice I could
> find was to reinstall the OS, so I did that.
>
> Now it comes up in busybox and there do not appear to be any errors at all.
>
> Is it possible the motherboard just went wacko?
>
> I ran the disk test and everything seemed to be fine.  I was able to
> mount the drive from a live CD boot, chroot and update-grub, and still
> no boot.
>
> After the reinstall, still no boot.
>
> It runs just fine from the live CD (actually a USB3 flash drive).
>
> The only change I can think of that might have impacted this was I
> changed the memory from 8GB to 16GB.   The last time I ran the memory
> test, it passed.

Well switch the memory back and find out.  If it is not that then the
fact that it was ok and then suddenly is not ok but runs fine from
live image means either there is a hardware problem or you have
somehow corrupted the o/s on disc (or a h/w problem has corrupted the
os). Given the history it still sounds likely it is a problem with the
disc.  You could pick up a cheap hard drive on ebay and try that in
order to to confirm it.  Also try re-installing the os again, if again
it works for a time and then fails that is further evidence of a disc
problem.

I presume you have already booted of live image and run the Disks
utility and checked the SMART data on the disc.

Colin