please help, Ubuntu 10.04 boot problems

[Dazed_75]

On Sun, Jan 13, 2013 at 6:00 PM, Mike Bushroe <mbushroe at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>

The one thing this specifically does NOT mean is that your hard drive is
OK.  You did not boot from it and did not have to read the same conttent as
if you had.  The fact that you can mount the partitions does not mean
much.  That fsck returned immediately tells me it is really not
doing/finishing the check.  I would look into the options for it or use
another disk checking utility.  Look at disk-utility or at some of the
rescue type disks.  Heck, you could even try spinrite though I would not
let it repair a journaled FS like ext4.

>
> Mike
>
> --
> But he lives on in a Horcrux named Siri
>
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-- 
Dazed_75 a.k.a. Larry

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