Waiting for root filsystem hang

[Cheesepie]

Hi
Not sure how this came about but the box rebooted itself for some reason and refused to get past this stage. I went into grub and changed hde1 to hda1 but that did nothing. The disk is unreadable by another Debian box, it gives the error "Cannot mount volume". Also unreadable in Windows via programs such as ext2toifs or Linux Reader.

If I boot via the CD and bring up the recovery console I can browse to my data, seems all intact but cant mount a network share to move it off, also tried making a .tar of all my stuff and FTPd' it across but I only received a massive corrupted file

Any ideas how to get my stuff of this drive or ideally make it boot?
Thanks,
-cheese

[devils casper]

Execute fsck on each partition using LiveCD and in case it doesn't work, post the output of fdisk -l command here.

[shtromm]

Sounds a bit like a faulty HDD - they have sometimes a phase in which they appear to function "randomly".

My advice: Boot from live CD, try to make a full backup of data (e.g. via an extrenal HDD), check the constistency of the fs (fsck) and run a badblocks.

[praka123]

This happens mostly with a failing disk;if not,
1)do you have any usb drive attached while system is booting?If yes,try removing that device and boot.
2)Another probability is ,there is not enough time to probe for your hard disks.
You can append "rootdelay=30" (upto 300 is allowed) appended to the grub line "kernel /boot/...vmlinuz ro ..." for this distro and boot again.
With Intel 945 boards ,"rootdelay=90" is used as a fix(ref:ubuntu bts)
and ,I just googled out this.have a look:
How to solve boot problems with Ubuntu after kernel upgrade
^this also talks about updating initramfs etc.

Try this .......