Failure to Boot after Update

[trevor4706]

Yesterday I installed some updates on my otherwise stable Kubuntu 8.10 installation. No re-boot called for. When I booted today the everything seemed normal until I arrived at the splash screen where the the blue bar slides back and forth under the Kubuntu logo and then moves from left to right to indicate progress of the boot process. Now the slide just keeps moving back from left to right and vice versa until the splash screen disappears, leaving me with a single word "initrafms". When I try to boot into rescue mode it hangs at mounting the root partition, so there's probably something pretty fundamental broken.

Does anyone know a fix other than a re-installation?

[lmilano]

Re: Failure to Boot after Update

Mmm. Can you chose an older kernel to boot? Do you see other entries in grub?

[Rog131]

Re: Failure to Boot after Update

There are several reasons why the system can't boot. I would check:


1) Disk Full

I would boot with the installation CD (Live CD) and mount the hard drive root partition - do you have separate root and home partitions ?.

After the mount i would check the free space (> FAQ: Free Disk Space) with the command:

df -h -T

2 Hardware problem

I would boot with the installation CD and run the fsck to the unmounted harddrive partitions > Topic: fsck, harddisk errors SOLVED


3) Turning the usplash off

The splash will hide the possible error/warning messages. At the Grub menu i would press e (edit) and disable the splash >how do I remove the splash screen in 7.04.

Any errors ? warnings ?

[trevor4706]

Re: Failure to Boot after Update

Thanks for the suggestions, Imilan and Reg131, but none of them worked. Since I have my /home directory on its own partition and a recent back-up, I decided the quickest fix would be a re-install, which is taking place as I type.

Thanks again.

[lmilano]

Re: Failure to Boot after Update

Great. Yes, except in systems with very small storage, like many notebooks, MID's , etc, a separate /home is a must. I wish the installer would make that simpler.

Thanks for the feedback!