[Solved] 18.3 and now 19 crash to busybox

[Ammok]

hello,

been running 18.3 quite happily for a while. then hit a problem.

I use suspend, but lately on occasion it would crash the pc.
A normal restart would tend to fix it.
Then last time it happened it crashed to busybox (initramfs) and there it stayed. No amount of reboots helped.

My HDD had been sounding a little grinding so I assumed it had become corrupted and bought a new SSD instead.

I eventually managed to recover data files from old pc hard drive so all is good. I thought.

Decided to load Mint 19.1 and new SSD flew, so well pleased.

This was three days ago, shut down pc, and rebooting today got Busybox again!

This appears to have happen since i updated 18.3 last wednesday, and co-incidently updated 19.1 last night.

Luckily I have an old 18.1 livecd which i will now use to re-install.

But I was wondering what is going with busybox?

Both times fsck says dev/mapper/mint--vg got serious issues and in 19.1 says it was missing entirely

I was wondering what was going on and if anyone got any information be pleased to receive it, don't mind reading.

I did a search on crashing busybox but of the five hits none appeared to be helpful. thanks in advance.

EDIT found a stable solution and corrected 19.1 to 19

[trope]

The same thing happened to me. I have not figured out how to fix it yet. I came across this post:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/567730/ ... ist#567897

I checked the hash on my disc and ran the integrity check, so I don't think it is the disc. Did you use LVM?

[Lord Boltar]

Have a look here
https://unix.stackexchange.com/question ... amfs-shell

[Ammok]

I think I have it solved. I was using LVM and Encryption which could have no bearing on my problem, i am just not experienced enough to be able to tell.

However, i went back to Mint 18.1 and then updated kernel to 4.4.0-133 with no encryption at all.

Not a single issue since. Not sure if it was the roll back or no encryption, but i am stable again.

[trope]

I also used LVM and encryption. The answer with 0 votes on this page:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/567730/ ... ist#567897
also mentions the problem with encryption. In my case, I could not run cryptsetup from the busybox terminal, so it could be the issue. However I did not like how the partitions were laid out and had a problem accessing one drive when I was in Mint, so I am going to reinstall without LVM.

[Ammok]

Your issue was so very very similar to mine, i too had a corrupt /dev/mapper exactly as you explain.

However, i could not open or repair from live cd as you were able too, best i got was two files in home folder that required further decryption even though they were decrypted if that makes sense.

However i got lucky and one instance of fsck dev/mapper from recovery console enabled me to access and copy the files i wanted.

This was 18.3 so i purchased new disk installed 19 and after two days hit exact same error, this time fsck reported whole thing missing.

So wiped it and happy with 18.1 now.