[SOLVED] Ubuntu 10.04 not loading; Can't find Home

[miketspike]

I have recently installed unbuntu on a second drive on my machine and am getting an error message during booting. The message is "The disk drive for /home is not ready not or not present". Below, it gives me the options to wait; skip mounting or manually mount home. If I skip, I get a series of errors related to /home followed by a blank screen. This is during the second boot; the first boot worked fine and the operating system ran smoothly. I ran all updates during that first session (don't know if this is related).

I have windows XP and XP64 on one drive, Ubuntu, several ext4 partitions, and one NTFS partition on a second, and data (ntfs) on a third. Windows is still working fine and I still boot through Grub.

I am new to linux so I don't really know where to start to trouble shoot this.

Any help getting around this would be appreciated.

Thanks,

[devils casper]

Hi and Welcome !

Something is wrong with /etc/fstab file and Graphics Card driver. Which Graphics Card do you have?

[miketspike]

Thanks for getting back to me. The Graphics card is an Nvidia Geforce 8600 GTS.

Also, interestingly, there are two options to boot into Ubuntu in my boot menu. I think the only difference between the two is ubuntu 2.6.32-21-generic and ubuntu 2.6..32-24-generic. Not sure if this is helpful or not.

Also, I failed to mention and maybe this related to the above issue. This is the second time I installed Ubunutu. The first install resulted in the same problem, so I reinstalled to the same situation.

[yancek]

ubuntu 2.6.32-21-generic and ubuntu 2.6..32-24-generic

These are two different kernels. The first was probably from your initital install and the second from the update, not really sure but that would make sense.

Did you create a separate /home partition?

Probably be a good idea to post the contents of the /etc/fstab file: cat /etc/fstab
Also post partition information: sudo fdisk -l (lower case Letter L in the command).

[devils casper]

Boot up from Ubuntu LiveCD and execute this in Terminal :

sudo fdisk -l

Post output here.

* Its small L in fdisk -l.

Mount / partition of Ubuntu and post contents /etc/fstab file here.

[miketspike]

Here's the fdisk.

Disk /dev/sda: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xe53c3473

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 121601 976760001 7 HPFS/NTFS

Disk /dev/sdb: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xb221b221

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 1 6629 53247411 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sdb2 6630 19456 103032877+ f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sdb5 6630 19456 103032846 7 HPFS/NTFS

Disk /dev/sdc: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xb26eb26e

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdc1 * 1 5107 41015625 83 Linux
/dev/sdc2 5107 19456 115264001 f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sdc5 6375 12748 51199123+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sdc6 12749 19456 53881978+ 83 Linux
/dev/sdc7 5107 5350 1953125 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sdc8 5350 6374 8228864 83 Linux

Partition table entries are not in disk order

Probably be a good idea to post the contents of the /etc/fstab file: cat /etc/fstab
Also post partition information: sudo fdisk -l (lower case Letter L in the command).

ubuntu@ubuntu:/etc$ cat /etc/fstab
aufs / aufs rw 0 0
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs nosuid,nodev 0 0
/dev/sdc7 swap swap defaults 0 0

[devils casper]

Execute this in Terminal of LiveCD

cd /media
sudo mkdir ubuntu
sudo mount -t ext4 /dev/sdc6  ubuntu
cat ubuntu/etc/fstab

Post output here.

[miketspike]

Sorry I missed this post. I wasn't alerted in my email for some reason...

The last command did not work. The mount was successful; however, the "ubuntu" directory contained files from my home directory. No etc directory was there. The below text is from the / directory.

The "ubuntu" directory contained lost+found and mike. I couldn't access lost+found, but mike contained all the desktop/profile files.

ubuntu@ubuntu:/etc$ cat fstab
aufs / aufs rw 0 0
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs nosuid,nodev 0 0
/dev/sdc7 swap swap defaults 0 0

[devils casper]

Mount /dev/sdc1 instead of sdc6 now. You have 3 Linux partitions and I thought that /dev/sdc1 is /boot and others are / and /home.

[miketspike]

Ok. Mounted the drive and here's the result of cat ubuntu/etc/fstab

ubuntu@ubuntu:/media$ cat ubuntu /etc/fstab
cat: ubuntu: Is a directory
aufs / aufs rw 0 0
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs nosuid,nodev 0 0
/dev/sdc7 swap swap defaults 0 0