please help, Ubuntu 10.04 boot problems

[Mike Bushroe]

I seem to have attracted some nasty gremlins to my laptop recently. Windoze
is pretty messed up after a life and death fight with the FBI ransomeware.
And I have had a succession of problems on the flip side running Ubuntu.

   The earliest I can remember of the sequence, Windoze was running fine
but the dual boot to Linux was crashing saying that something was wrong
with the harddrive. AT the recovery prompt, and later off the live CD, I
tried running fsck on the ext4 partition and it always returned instantly
saying no problems. I thought at first a Grub problem, but then realized
that I was getting the grub menu just fine, it was a Linux boot problem. So
I decided to re-install 10.04 on top of what is already there and see if it
over wrote whatever files or sectors were bad.

After load from the live CD, it would boot fine, but the touch pad, sound,
and other internal features didn't work. So I assumed that the CD version
did not have as broad a range of special laptop driver files, and
downloaded and burned the 10.04 DVD. I repeated the process of over-writing
the current OS by installing on top of it. Now, the boot dies just after
grub tries to start Linux, and leaves me with a flashing underline prompt
that echoes everything back, including "^C". When I try again in recovery
mode, about 3.4 seconds into the boot process it completely stops. The last
lines written are:

Attached scsi generic sga type 0
[sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk

   In case I had something strange on a removable USB, I pulled the USB hub
cable, got a fresh list of boot steps that ended with the same ones above,
but with a much later time stamp. The other strange thing I saw was a few
line above, there were 5 instances of request_module: runaway loop modprobe
bifmt-464c. I have no idea if that means anything.

I am currently typing this on the same laptop (Toshiba Satellite
P505-S8980), but booting off the LiveDVD, so I know that the hardware is
good. I can mount and read both the ext4 and Windoze partitions with no
problem.

Mike

-- 
But he lives on in a Horcrux named Siri
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