Can not boot LM 18.3

[RonR]

After I ejected a USB drive I have been unable to boot my system to LM 18.3. Something has denied me access to boot it has also somehow marked random files as not accessible though though permissions have not been changed. The Screen shot below is the bottom half of the boot after the failure.

There are other issues that happened at the same time. Some files and directories have somehow been marked "Access Denied" however the permissions for the files show correctly but I can not copy the files. The FileLockOut.odt file was obtained via a LM 19.3 bootable USB drive.

I hope someone can come up with a reason for these errors before I blow the whole partition away in install LM20.1 cinnamon. To me it looks like a piece of malware but I have no idea how or where I acquired it. When I was on the Brave Web Browser forum last night I saw someone else describe the same issues so I do not think it is just a quirk with my system. I am also dual boot with W10 and it comes up and works fine.

Thanks in advance for any help. I am willing to wait a couple days for questions before I install LM 20.After I ejected a USB drive I have been unable to boot my system to LM 18.3. Something has denied me access to boot it has also somehow marked random files as not accessible though though permissions have not been changed. The Screen shot below, BootIssuesReduced2.png, is the bottom half of the boot after the failure.

There are other issues that happened at the same time. Some files and directories have somehow been marked "Access Denied" however the permissions for the files show correctly but I can not copy the files. The FileLockOut.odt file was obtained via a LM 19.3 bootable USB drive.

I hope someone can come up with a reason for these errors before I blow the whole partition away in install LM20.1 cinnamon. To me it looks like a piece of malware but I have no idea how or where I acquired it. When I was on the Brave Web Browser forum last night I saw someone else describe the same issues so I do not think it is just a quirk with my system. I am also dual boot with W10 and it comes up and works fine.

Thanks in advance for any help. I am willing to wait a couple days for questions before I install LM 20.

[gittiest personITW]

Welcome to the forums.

I believe 18.3 isn't supported any longer which does mean that you are running a, possibly, insecure operating system - not that it means you have malware on your machine.
If you are looking to install 20.1, now is as good a time as any to do that.

Have you lost any data or is it safe?
If you need to get stuff onto an external drive then its easy enough to do it from Live Mint before installing 20.1.

Post back if you need more info.

[Pierre]

just out of idle curiosity, you could try using the Grub Repair Tool,
that is on the LM20x series, that would be on your usb live LinuxMint media,
- to see if that will get the existing LM18.3 system working.

[spamegg]

Most probably your file system has errors and needs fsck run on it. At the busybox prompt type exit and it usually automatically runs fsck. Otherwise, you can boot into a live USB Mint installer, and run fsck /dev/sda1, fsck /dev/sda2, fsck /dev/sdb1 etc. from the Terminal.

[RonR]

Most probably your file system has errors and needs fsck run on it. At the busybox prompt type exit and it usually automatically runs fsck. Otherwise, you can boot into a live USB Mint installer, and run fsck /dev/sda1, fsck /dev/sda2, fsck /dev/sdb1 etc. from the Terminal.

THANKS VERY MUCH!! this worked back up and running. There were so many fsck errors and all were fixed. Now I can get setup to do a proper upgrade with all my data intact.

[AndyMH]

How old is the drive, maybe time to think about replacing it?

Run disks and from the menu top right run smart data tests.