Felicia: Crash! BusyBox. ?Bug: Repeated!

[T J Tulley]

[Edit: 26/1/09-00:20] The following has now happened twice - I was doing almost exactly the same thing - except that this time I didn't have nearly as many tabs in Firefox, and only one screen open. Last time the fault cured itself after a Supergrub session and running recovery mode for Elyssa in a different partition - then a repair process happened and that has not happened this time - at present Felicia keeps on booting to BusyBox whether it's in normal or recovery mode. Since this has happened twice perhaps there really is a bug?

I'm posting this via PuppyLinux because I don't want to use Elyssa with a risk of downloading e-mails to Thunderbird there. I shall finish the edit then reply to give the post a boost.

Here's the story which has repeated:
I was scrolling through my Bookmarks to open a new tab in FireFox, when my screen froze: the Mouse pointer was permanently in Search mode (hand+arrow) and moved but produced no response anywhere. [Ctrl][Alt][Del] also produced no response so I pressed Reset on the box. Admittedly I had an unreasonable number of tabs accessible in 3 different openings of Firefox so I guess I was asking for trouble with only 1 GB of RAM. I guess that crashes can result from unintentional mouse-clicks generating conflicting commands.

Felicia has behaved excellently for 3 weeks since installation apart from a problem with Thunderbird after an Update. I think that cleared at next boot. Always Hibernated successfully - as did Elyssa but that always reported failure!

Ever since this crash Felicia has failed to boot - even in Recovery mode. Here's the last bit of the booting screen log (from manuscript notes):
"Running /scripts/init-bottom
mount: mounting /root/dev on /dev/.static/dev - failed: no such file or directory
Done
mount: mounting /sys on /root/sys: - failed: - no such file or directory
mount: mounting /proc on /root/proc: - failed: - no such file or directory
Target filesystem doesn't have /sbin/init:
No init found. Try passing init=bootarg

BusyBox v 1.10.2 built-in shell" - with the usual accompanying description and advice, and opening command line.

I tried Supergrub, first to fix Grub - reported Done - same result. Then I tried the Direct boot tool in Supergrub - black screen for about 3 minutes, so presumably failure.

I shall be grateful for any advice about avoiding a re-install to get Felicia running again. At present I've booted into my last installation of Elyssa, still present. but I lack a recent backup of e-mails. I tried to access the home partition of Felicia using PuppyLinux (a tip from Fred some time ago) but so far have failed find the correct partition to mount in Puppy. Currently I'm using the web portal of my e-mail service, but that is misbehaving and I'm losing items I wanted to save. I doubt if they have been forwarded to my e-mail address. I think that only applies to mails still on the web server, where they normally arrive as Unread, even if I've read them on-line.

[maybeway36]

SystemRescueCD has a root=auto feature to try and boot any Linux system it finds. That might help you get into Mint.

[T J Tulley]

Thanks, maybeway - that's a useful tip for the future.

This time however I tried using the facilities in BusyBox - but couldn't get out of there without a Reset.

At next boot, repairs were reported, then again, and after that I had a successful boot of Felicia.

I had managed to copy my .mozilla, .mozilla-thunderbird, .tomboy and .tomboy.log files from the then-unusable Felicia system to a backup folder using PuppyLinux, but that doesn't seem to be as user-friendly as when I first tried it.

[T J Tulley]

Replying to boost!