Updated and rebooted - now all I have is a busybox shell on a ramdisk!

[DrTwox]

I did an update/upgrade/reboot cycle this morning and now when booting all I get is a busybox shell. I have done a fresh install and update, but the same thing happens. What on earth has gone wrong?

The shell prompt looks like this: (initramfs)

Update: This morning I reinstalled again (from the Beta1 iso) and when that finished I did an update/upgrade with apt-get, and during the installation of the updates the Grub configuration said it could not find the drive it was installed on and prompted me to select which drive to use. I selected sda and sda1 (only drives/partitions available) and rebooted when the rest of the updates finished. Same result... What further information do I need to provide to get some help with this?

Update2: After further investigation and help from IRC I've found that this is a known bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...ls/+bug/941874

[DrTwox]

I have one SATA drive with RAID disabled in the BIOS - whatever raid/lvm configuration is being used is chosen by the installer and is later broken by updates.

[dibl]

You did not say you installed Kubuntu on a fakeraid stripe -- and if you're indeed a novice then I don't imagine that you did. Did the procedures to resume booting, as described in that bug report, allow your system to continue booting? If not, there are other possible causes, including a corrupted master boot record on the hard drive, but we would need to know more about your hardware. Is it a standard brand and model of computer, or did you build it? Either the brand and model, or the motherboard brand and model, would be helpful to assess the situation. Also, in your BIOS, on the SATA channel, what mode do you have it set to? And just to confirm, there is only one hard disk drive in the system?

[DrTwox]

I can resume booting yes. I execute 'dmraid -ay' then exit the shell, this will resume booting.... but I have to do it every boot, which is annoying.

The motherboard is an EVGA nForce 680i SLI with a single 120GB Seagate hard drive. I will have to be humble and say I was very wrong about the drive - the drive is in fact not SATA, but PATA on the first IDE channel. It's been so long since I looked inside this machine!
This hardware setup worked without issue with Kubuntu 10.10 and 11.04. I skipped 11.10, so I can't report any isssues with that release.

[dibl]

Understanding that you first experienced the problem following an update/upgrade/reboot, which always makes one suspect a software bug of some kind, I'm going to gently suggest that when aging hardware is going to have a problem booting an OS, you will always first see the problem when booting/rebooting. Take a look at this:

http://www.techsupportforum.com/foru...or-163199.html

Here's another: http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/sla...no-legacy.html

Possibly the CMOS battery on the motherboard has given up, possibly a motherboard component is failing, possibly the old PATA drive is no longer able to spin up as fast as the BIOS needs it to -- those are all common signs of aging hardware.

If, on the other hand, it is in fact a Kubuntu 12.04 bug of some kind, it should be fixed in the next week or two. But I don't think it's the software.

[DrTwox]

I do not believe it is a hardware problem - If I reinstall from the Beta1 iso (and I've done that several times since this problem surfaced!), I can reboot as often as I like with no problem at all. It's not until I update the system that the problem occurs. I'll keep an eye on the bug report I linked and see where that goes.

[DrTwox]

I installed updates today that included dmraid and kpartx - problem fixed!