PLEASE HELP! Stuck with Busybox (Edited)

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T J Tulley
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PLEASE HELP! Stuck with Busybox (Edited)

Post by T J Tulley »

After a long period using Hibernate from Elyssa, I decided that it is time to do a re-start. Now this always fails and lands me in Busybox. Various Wiki articles give some guidance, but I've found none referring to the Debian version built into Linux Mint.

In principle it should be possible to boot from Busybox - but how? In it, I can cd to /root which turns out to be my defunct Windows system - I can navigate to any file in that via cd.

But if I cd to /dev, ls -a shows its contents, including sdb2 where Elyssa's root folder is installed, but it reports "Can't cd to sdb2".

Currently Supergrub fails to boot me into Elyssa. At present it's giving me a long-lasting black screen after Enter to select Elyssa for booting.

I'm sending this under Windows from my laptop - and still hoping for advice about my failed installation of Elyssa on an external hdd which was connected to this. I had to use Supergrub to restore the Windows MBR on this machine after that attempt.

Addition by edit: I've used Supergrub to fix the Grub Bootloader in the PC Elyssa installation: it still goes to Busybox every time. When I first installed Elyssa, it used to go to Busybox 2 or 3 times, then boot properly.
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Topic automatically closed 6 months after creation. New replies are no longer allowed.
Yours hopefully -

Theo Tulley.
Using a PC with 2GB RAM, 3 hdds and a 1.7 GHz Celeron cpu.
DSpencer

Re: PLEASE HELP! Stuck with Busybox (Edited)

Post by DSpencer »

I have found that I can rarely boot into any linux on any machine (and I have many, different models, motherboards, chipsets) without the kernel option 'acpi=off'. That includes the Linux Mint KDE beta 045 LiveCD. In fact when I didn't have that added to my 'menu.lst', and tried to boot into my fresh Linux Mint install, I eventually got dumped into 'BusyBox'.
I fixed this initially by interrupting grub at its menu (where you can edit the kernel options), added the option 'acpi=off', then when booted edited 'menu.lst' inside Linux Mint.
The claim is that such options as 'acpi=off' , 'noapic' or sometimes 'pci=bios' are needed to overcome "broken" bioses. Considering every bios I have encountered seems to be "broken" maybe this is more of a general linux kernel problem.
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T J Tulley
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Re: PLEASE HELP! Stuck with Busybox (Edited)

Post by T J Tulley »

Thanks, DSpenser:
I have tried to interrupt while grub loads, but haven't discovered at which point in time to do it - I read recently that [Esc] is HOW to do it.

The fact that Busybox is installed in the system and programmed to appear when grub fails, suggests that it should itself provide the tool to continue, but information is hard to come by. Its commands come with no manuals, and searching produces only very general articles about it. I start by ls -a which shows me the accessible folders. If I then cd to root I can see that I am in sdb1 which is my non-working Win-XP-Pro partition - but I can't cd to /dev/sdb2 which is where I need to be to edit /boot/grub/menu.lst. I can cd to /dev where ls -a shows me a long list including sdb and its partitions, as well as non-existent sda - or they are not named in accord with device.map which is probable.

One problem which has now appeared is that this installation comes with device.map set as hd0=sdb, hd1=sdc, hd2=sdc, (as I knew) but the boot program seen while in Recovery Mode near its end shows sda2, and finally announces sda2 does not exist. Is that perhaps the result of grub repair by Supergrub?

Some forum posts mention booting via the live CD, but I don't see how that can happen - it isn't possible to write to hardware from the live cd, and the only alternative is re-install - a lengthy process with all the added software to re-install as well. This has wasted a whole day already.

With thanks again -
Yours hopefully -

Theo Tulley.
Using a PC with 2GB RAM, 3 hdds and a 1.7 GHz Celeron cpu.
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