boot stops after displaying "Loading initial ramdisk..."

[Tom H]

On Sun, Oct 13, 2019 at 6:11 PM robert <robert at redcor.ch> wrote:
>
> while working on my Dell xps 15 laptop with Ubuntu 19.10 beta Firefox started to behave strangely.
>
> So I rebooted my laptop. Since then it fails to boot.
>
> I tried to run it from a 19.04 live cd, and then to upgrade/update as described in:
>
> https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCdRecovery#Update_Failure
>
> Update Failure
>
> If there was an update that made your system non-bootable and they have fixed it in the repositories, you can use the Live CD to run apt-get to get the new files to fix your system.
>
> Boot the Ubuntu Live CD.
>
> Press Ctrl-Alt-F1
>
> sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
>
> sudo mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev
>
> sudo mount --bind /proc /mnt/proc
>
> sudo mount --bind /sys /mnt/sys
>
> sudo chroot /mnt
>
> apt update
>
> apt upgrade
>
> this did not help.

What do "it fails to boot" and "this did not help" mean?

I'd use

sudo mount -o rbind /dev /mnt/dev
sudo mount -o rbind /proc /mnt/proc #or -t proc  proc /mnt/proc
sudo mount -o rbind /sys /mnt/sys

rbind: "/dev" and "/sys" have submounts

proc: it doesn't need to be a bind-mount