Elyssa won't start

[T J Tulley]

I prepared partitions for Elyssa: sda2, 4.7 GB = /, sda3, 2.4 GB = swap, sda4, 30.4 GB = /home.

Installation proceeded without apparent snags; I selected Daryna for imported Docs & Settings and skipped language files though suspicious that it reported language = EN in Open Office - I would prefer to see EN-UK.

After completion, startup gave a long period with a black border round the mint screen with a reciprocating patch on the progress bar. Then it produced the Busybox text screen!

Ctrl+Alt+Del gave a restart with the same result. I tried Recovery mode - this produced a text screen - pressing Ctrl-D several times ultimately produced:
Alert - /dev/sda2 does not exist. Dropping to a shell.
Then Busybox appeared again.

So I selected my old Daryna. I had to edit its fstab to take account of the changes to sda partitions, and ulimately was able to boot (in Daryna) with the new sda2 and sda4 appearing on the Desktop. These both open - sda4 shows lost+found and theo (my username). theo opens to show only .mozilla, .bash_logout, .bashrc_vanilla and .profile - surely the imports should also include .mozilla-thunderbird, .tomboy and .tomboy.log? - and all the usual folders in user's home are missing.

sda2 opens to show:
/media/sda2/bin - - 106 items
/media/sda2/boot - - 8 items
/media/sda2/cdrom
/media/sda2/dev - - 201 items
/media/sda2/etc - - 244 items
/media/sda2/home
/media/sda2/initrd
/media/sda2/lib - - 151 items
/media/sda2/lost+found
/media/sda2/media - 5 items
/media/sda2/mnt
/media/sda2/proc
/media/sda2/root - 10 items
/media/sda2/sbin - 169 items
/media/sda2/srv
/media/sda2/sys
/media/sda2/tmp - - 8 items
/media/sda2/usr - - 9 items
/media/sda2/var - - 12 items
/media/sda2/initrd.img 8.2 MB link to gzip archive
/media/sda2/vmlinuz 1.8 MB link to unknown

Those not shown are 0-items including - NB - /media/home

This full report is given hoping that it may be helpful - and, please, what should I do next?

[GameKing505]

I'm having the same problem unfortunately. It's a pity too because Elyssa looks like such a good OS. Shame it won't boot...

These people are also suffering:

http://linuxmint.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=13809

http://linuxmint.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=13330

http://linuxmint.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=13400

(along with others that I know but can't find)

If anyone knows how to solve this problem then please speak up. It really sucks.

[T J Tulley]

Thanks - that's a useful assembly of similar complaints. I hope a senior member of the team will respond - perhaps in an announcement?

My three reported hdds (in my sig file) are sda 80GB primary master and sdb 200GB primary slave. (secondary master and slave are DVD R-W and CD-ROM). All of these are EIDE.

SATA1 (sdc) is 500GB - SATA2 is void. I had a 200GB EIDE in an adapter there but it had an intermittent connection so I removed it.

So the problem might be that there is a SATA drive - though it is not used for this installation of Elyssa. Daryna is installed on that and worked fine for a fair time, but now fails to connect to the internet, so I have another Daryna on sdb1 which I am currently using. sdc1 is used for backups.

Of course I had to chmod the fstab files to edit them, but it is useful to be able to see what is actually on the Elyssa partitions, viewing them via Daryna. I have not so far tried editing grub files.