[nylug-talk] Boot Failure after Attempted Ubuntu Upgrade

[James Keenan]

I am seeking suggestions as to how to respond to the following  
problem:  I am unable to restart my computer following an attempted  
upgrade in Ubuntu.

I have been using Ubuntu for about 7 months.  I know I started with  
Hoary and I *thought* I had upgraded to Breezy.  But I can't be  
certain of that, as my /etc/apt/sources.list continued to show me at  
Hoary.

In any event, yesterday I decided to upgrade to Edgy, jumping over  
Dapper Drake.  That upgrade didn't go so well, I got reports of  
broken packages, etc.  I think that one of the error reports made  
reference to 'initramfs'.  The upgrade did not succeed.

At that point I figured it would be better to just go up one step.  I  
googled and learned that if I edited my etc/apt/sources.list file, I  
could target the distribution I wanted (Breezy) and then install it  
with a couple of
apt-get commands:  apt-get install and apt-get dist-upgrade.

This worked fairly well.  The apt-get dist-upgrade command completed  
without listing any errors.  I saw the expected directory structure  
at my terminal and my desktop was as expected.  I could ssh to other  
servers where I do work and I had Internet access.

The only problem was that when I clicked on the new Thunderbird icon  
to look at my mail, I got a message that said that another instance  
of Thunderbird was running and that I would either have to shut that  
process off or restart.  This was puzzling, because I had closed  
Thunderbird before starting the upgrade to Breezy.

I figured this would be an appropriate point to restart my computer,  
and went to do so in the normal manner.  The Dell splash was normal  
and the first lines of the reboot (which I think refer to Grub) came up.

Then, all of a sudden, I got the following:

segmentation fault
segmentation fault
segmentation fault
segmentation fault
segmentation fault
segmentation fault
segmentation fault

ALERT!  /dev/sda1 does not exist.  Dropping to a shell!
Busy Box v1.1.3 (Debian 1:1.1.3-2 ubuntu 3) Built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

/bin/sh can't access tty; job-control turned off (initramfs)

[Note:  I'm typing what I wrote down yesterday afternoon, but after  
googling and seeing similar error messages, I'm wondering whether it  
actually wasn't "/dev/hda1 does not exist."]

At this point, screen froze and no input was accepted from the  
keyboard. The only thing I could do was hit and hold the reboot  
button on the hard drive -- which only brought me back to the same  
point.  I repeated this several times, one time holding down the F12  
key.  But the menu that came up via F12 didn't present any solutions  
that leapt out to me.  The Dell splash screen also offered F1, but I  
didn't think to explore it.

Last night and this morning I googled extensively and posted most of  
the above information here:  http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php? 
t=293186.  I've thought about it overnight and am thinking that it's  
a problem GRUB is having loading the kernel and OS.  But I haven't  
had to delve into GRUB or boot loading problems in 5 years.

So my questions for the readers of this list are:

1.  When I next attempt to restart this computer (which won't be  
until tomorrow), what should I do first?  F1?  F12?  Some Linux  
combination of ALT+CTRL+ an F key?

2.  Assuming I can get some sort of menu or shell with which I can  
interact, what should I do to get Ubuntu to boot safely?  (Since I  
know my data -- mainly mail -- is intact, I want to preserve it.)

3.  Once I have Ubuntu reloaded, what should I check to make sure the  
problem is fixed before I either (a) next restart the drive or (b)  
next try to upgrade?

Thank you very much.

Jim Keenan