LinuxMint9 OS Crash NEED HELP!!!

[oldhippie57]

Big problem. Woke up this AM and my LM9 apparently crashed overnight. What I've got in this Gigabyte AMD64 box is Linux Mint 9 Xfce, 2.6.32-45 generic configured as dual-boot with Linux Mint 13 (which is what I'm using now, working fine) Really can't say how or why the LM9 crapped out. The only thing I had actively running overnight was last.fm desktop application. Tried rebooting this morning and this is what I get:
No init found. Try passing init=bootarg.
BusyBox v1.13.3 (Ubuntu 1:1.13.3-1 ubuntu11) built-in shell(ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.
(initramfs)
Recovery mode also gives me the same as above. Also tried booting with an earlier kernel (2.6.32-21 I believe) and again, the same as above.
Linux Mint 9 is the main OS I work in and most of my "stuff" is in there. Is there any way to get in, in terminal? I have no idea on what I need to type in, so if anyone can walk me through it, it would be greatly appreciated. I've never had a problem with this distro,that's why I've made it my workhorse for almost 3 years. I know it's about to be "retired" soon and I'll be transfering everything here to this LM13 but I gotta get in there to save what I can.
I haven't posted much here in the forum, haven't had to, everything has just hummed along...'til now. Any help in a timely manner (like ASAP), as I said, would be greatly appreciated.

[oldhippie57]

Really? If the OS can't be saved, it would be helpful to know and I'll move on. Not one person wants to help? 17 have looked at my post. And snark replies aren't helpful. (Gotten those in the past, just saying.)

[DataMan]

Depending upon the type of data you want to save, the easy route would be to boot to you Mint 13. Create a directory say in /media/sda<#>. Mount the partition for you MInt 9 in the /media folder for sda<#>. Copy your data over to your Mint 13 (or other storage areas).

If you have adequate storage space, I'd recommend doing partition level backups in the future (fsarchiver or clonezilla etc.). If done properly, this would give you a recovery point if these disasters occur in the future.

If you need specifics on creating the folder and mounting your Mint 9 partition, reply back and someone should be able to walk you through it.

-DataMan

[oldhippie57]

Thank ya Dataman! I'll give that a try. If I need to, I'll see if I can grab some free space from the LM9 partition with GParted. The LM13 partition is the smaller one when I split the HD.

[oldhippie57]

I guess I will need some help. I did create a folder in File System/File Manager/ media and named it sda1 (the partition LM9 resides in). After that I don't really know how to proceed. Anybody out there wants to jump in and walk me through this, it would be greatly appreciated.

[DataMan]

to actually mount the partition:

Code: Select all

sudo mount /dev/sda1 /media/sda1


After you have mounted it, you should be able to drag files etc. from the /media/sda1 to your destination on the currently active partition. If you wnat to do any changes to the mounted partition, right click on /media/sda1 and go to properties and chane ownership and/or group to your active login id (this can also be done at the terminal level with commands).

-DataMan

[oldhippie57]

Hey DataMan, Gave that a try and what I got was:
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda1, missing codepage or helper program, or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try dmesg | tail or so
Then back to terminal prompt.
But thanks for your help, thus far!