Bianca no longer boots after aborted Ubuntu installation

[major day]

Help.

I don't know if I can explain this properly, but here goes: -

I started to install Ubuntu Feisty (in a different partition from Bianca), but aborted the installation partway, because the installer was proposing to format swap files from existing installations (Kubuntu Feisty and Bianca), and I didn't want it to do that.

On trying to boot into Bianca after this, I got the following: -

Log of fsck -C -R -A -a
Sun Apr 1 12:02:33 2007

fsck 1.39 (29-May-2006)
/dev/sda1: clean, 107987/7290880 files, 1233054/14560000 blocks
/dev/sda3: clean, 12/7290880 files, 274916/14562922 blocks
Failed to open the device 'UUID=fbdd9414-41e4-4cb8-8150-556b5d39d9d0': No such file or directory


fsck died with exit status 8

Sun Apr 1 12:02:33 2007
----------------

On doing Ctrl-Alt-Del, the boot process continued as normal.

Can anybody give me some idea what's gone wrong, and how to go about rectifying the problem, please?

Let me know if any further info is needed.

Thanks,

Major Day

[Boo]

I would try booting off a live CD (like mint or some rescue distro) and fsck all the partitions manually.
well that is a good place to start.

[major day]

Me again.

I'm having problems running fsck; I've printed out the Linux man page on the subject, and it doesn't make a lot of sense to me (Why don't they give examples? Or am I the only person who doesn't understand this stuff?).

However, it does occur to me that the log entry is telling me that the device UUID=fbdd.... etc doesn't exist, so even if I knew how to run fsck, it might not tell me much that's useful.

There can't be much wrong; Ctrl-Alt-Del or, more usefully, Ctrl-D will allow the boot process to continue, and once I'm in, everything seems to be working ok. So presumably, everything's there that needs to be there.

Any thoughts on how I can learn more on how to use fsck? I've got half a dozen books on Ubuntu and other flavours of Linux, and not one of them even mentions it.

Cheers,

Major Day

[Boo]

fsck was using your /etc/fstab file to check the file systems listed there but it excluded the / partiton since it cann't check mounted file systems.
so the fs it failed on would be the third one listed in your fstab (minus the root partiton).
so what does you fstab look like?
Using a live CD you could check your / partion and any others.
the partition it failed on may not need to be fsck'ed.

[bob]

I think this will get you going again: http://linuxmint.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=552

[major day]

Okay, onwards and sideways.

Boo, I'm sorry, I obviously didn't explain myself very well; I tried running fsck from the Mint Live CD, but all I kept getting was the version number. I don't understand how to use the options, even after ploughing through the Linux man page. I also don't understand what capabilities fsck has; will it enable me to fix the problem? Or does it just report the problem?

Bob, I had a look at the link you gave me. As a result, I removed the UUID entries from fstab. It still does what it did before.

I tried Googling fstab, to try to gain some sort of insight into how it works, and how to edit it, but I'm not much further forward. Here's how my fstab looks at the moment; -

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/sda4 / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1
/dev/hda1 /media/hda1 ntfs defaults,nls=utf8,umask=007,gid=46 0 1
/dev/sda1 /media/sda1 ext3 defaults 0 2
/dev/sda3 /media/sda3 ext3 defaults 0 2
/dev/sda8 /media/sda8 reiserfs defaults 0 2
/dev/sda6 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/hdc /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto 0 0

A couple of things strike me; sda5 and sda7, both swap files, aren't mentioned, and sda6 has 'none' under 'mount point'. Is that ok?

Also, the UUID that appears in the checkfs log entry mentioned in my first post on this subject is the UUID for sda8, which isn't relevant to booting from sda4 (Mint). Is the boot process expecting to find information regarding the swap file at this point?

sda8, incidentally, is formatted, but blank.

Thanks again for the assistance so far, guys.

Cheers,

Major Day

[major day]

Hi again.

I don't know exactly what was going on, but the problem seemed to me to be with the fstab entry for /sda8. I re-configured this partition as ext3, but fstab didn't change to reflect this alteration, continuing to report it as reiferfs. So I manually altered the entry for /sda8, and all is now well.

I don't know what went wrong, though I assume it must have been caused by my aborted installation of Ubuntu Feisty.

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction, guys. Hope this all makes sense, btw.

Major Day