Linux Mint Forums

Hi Everyone-

I have been using Linux for about a year, but brand new to Mint. I installed Elyssa last week and instantly loved it.

Here's what happened:

I noticed some things degrading over the past few days The Mint menu would not close automatically. The Home folder would open every time I booted even if it was closed when I exited the previous session. My windows NTFS partition stopped automounting. Then Mint update broke. I checked out the forums and found that some others started experiencing the same issues over the last few days.

So I decided (wrongly now in hindsight) to perform an update using Synaptic. Upon reboot the system just hangs at the Mint splash screen. After a few minutes I get an error message that /dev/hda5 does not exist and then busybox opens.

I can see that hda5 is fine and mounted using Parted Magic.

Can someone please help me get up and running again?

If you updated everything with synaptic, then you got a newer kernel(2.6.24-19). Try booting with an older kernel from the grub menu.

Thanks for the reply.

I tried using the other kernel option, but it didn't work. With the new kernel it hangs almost right at the start. With the older kernel it goes on for a while before it stops. Sorry, I'm at work and can't remember what it's doing when it stops something about SCSI I think. Do I have to reinstall?

When you can get to your PC, just post the errors you are getting. You might also need to boot the live CD and post copies of your /etc/fstab file, and the output of from a terminal.

Thanks again. I should be able to get to it in the next 1.5-2 hours.

Sounds like your grub menu is mapped to the wrong drive letter if your dropping to busybox. Was there a new kernel added? or else a program did it (startup manager i.e) You could try to turn on computer. Wait for grub screen. Hit the arrow keys just to stop it from automatically booting the default. Make sure the fist line is highlighted (Mint). You will see at the bottom of the screen the boot options.. (ro quite splash should be at the end of your default kernel line). arrow left until you see hda5 on that line.. change this to say sda5 (should say somthing like root=/dev/sda5) Hit enter and see if that works.

Edit: read that too quick.. I see that you did say you have a new kernel. If this was your problem you will want to make this permanet by editing your grub menu.lst... post back if you need help with that.