Ubuntu – Boot drops to a (initramfs) prompts/busybox

bootinitramfs

I am running an HP pavilion dv6000 dual boot win7 and Ubuntu 12.04. (well, up until today). After a reboot, the boot process drops to the BusyBox shell and I end up at the prompt:

BusyBox v1.18.5 (Ubuntu 1:1.18.5-1ubuntu4) built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

(initramfs)

I've been researching others who have had this same problem, but haven't been able to find any of those solutions to work for me.

I tried the method described here, and after the final command 

mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /root -o force

it does nothing and gives me another (initramfs) prompt.

I can boot to a live CD (USB) and get to a terminal, but it doesn't seem to do much good, as I can see the /dev/sda1 in the ls command, but it doesn't recognize it when I try to cd to it.

One more question: using the command fdisk -l how can I tell which mount point (sda1/sda2) is my windows partition and which one is Ubuntu?

Best Answer

While at initramfs console, I passed a command exit to come out of the shell. The same console was presented before me but this time with the exact name of the partition that got corrupted.

BusyBox v1.18.5 (Ubuntu 1:1.18.5-1ubuntu4) built-in shell (ash) 
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

(initramfs) exit

/dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-root: UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY; RUN fsck MANUALLY.
(i.e., without -a or -p options) 
fsck exited with status code 4. 
The root filesystem on /dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-root requires a manual fsck. 

BusyBox v1.18.5 (Ubuntu 1:1.18.5-1ubuntu4) built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

(initramfs) fsck /dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-root -y

fsck from util-linux 2.27.1
e2fsck 1.42.13 (17-May-2015)
/dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-root contains a file system with errors, check forced.

After the checking is done, I rebooted the system.

BusyBox v1.18.5 (Ubuntu 1:1.18.5-1ubuntu4) built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

(initramfs) reboot

If reboot doesn't work, try exit.

and that's it, I got back into the filesystem without any errors.

Related Question