Mint gives user heartattack...
Posted: Fri Jul 25, 2008 11:10 am
Today I rebooted my Mint this morning and it did not come up. Images of terrible disaster and a late night filled my brain, along with a certain sense of doom.
Here's what happened:
I am pretty new to Mint but not new to Linux or Ubuntu. I found the latest Mint to be really nice so far.
I am a developer. This morning was a good time to reboot my machine, so I did! Imagine my shock when the machine fell into the BusyBox prompt and I was stuck. Unable to read hard drive! Sick feeling in my gut. I booted the Live CD and everything worked. But what's wrong with my Mint?
I reboot in recovery mode and this time I get a little menu offering to repair some things. I say go ahead and fix my packages. I get 189 MB of new stuff. Wow! That's really scary. I reboot and now I have another kernel so I let that one boot up. Again, hello failure.
But this time there were several messages about USB. This was enough to find the issue, for the previous day I was using my USB stick with all my pragmatic books as PDF on it. That hummer was still plugged in. I quickly removed it, and all is now well.
The question is: why won't Mint boot with my USB stick plugged in? This is a serious flaw, and it's not a BIOS setting. The second question is: why did Mint find 189 MB of updates when the GUI update tool is telling me there are no updates? Any conceivable reason seems like a bug to me.
Here's what happened:
I am pretty new to Mint but not new to Linux or Ubuntu. I found the latest Mint to be really nice so far.
I am a developer. This morning was a good time to reboot my machine, so I did! Imagine my shock when the machine fell into the BusyBox prompt and I was stuck. Unable to read hard drive! Sick feeling in my gut. I booted the Live CD and everything worked. But what's wrong with my Mint?
I reboot in recovery mode and this time I get a little menu offering to repair some things. I say go ahead and fix my packages. I get 189 MB of new stuff. Wow! That's really scary. I reboot and now I have another kernel so I let that one boot up. Again, hello failure.
But this time there were several messages about USB. This was enough to find the issue, for the previous day I was using my USB stick with all my pragmatic books as PDF on it. That hummer was still plugged in. I quickly removed it, and all is now well.
The question is: why won't Mint boot with my USB stick plugged in? This is a serious flaw, and it's not a BIOS setting. The second question is: why did Mint find 189 MB of updates when the GUI update tool is telling me there are no updates? Any conceivable reason seems like a bug to me.