Unable to boot - no init found

[Kabuthunk]

This error message just started coming up since the day before yesterday. I have no clue what prompted it, since it seemed to boot up just fine prior to this.


...Aaaand it appears I can't post an image to the error until I've made 15 posts. Unfortunately, I'd rather not type out a page of seemingly random characters, nor do I want to spam the forum to get 15 posts... so I'll just post the link to the image that has the fairly lengthy error screen. Please open the following:

mts.net/~redrum/filler.jpg

note: The above only seems to like working with the www in front... but I can't post it in here, otherwise it thinks it's a link to an image, and won't let me post.

I attempted to run the "fsck" command that had helped when Ubuntu was unable to mount anything a few months ago, but clearly that command no longer exists.

So... yeah, I haven't the foggiest clue what to do. Any suggestions?

[Rubberman]

initrd, or init, is a key part of the bootstrap process for the operating system. This means that something (or someone) has removed it from /boot. Have you tried booting an older kernel using the grub menu? Each kernel will have its own init file. If you can't find it, you may have to boot from a live/recovery CD/DVD/USB device, manually mount the root (/) and boot (/boot) file system(s), download the kernel source, and build the kernel, which should also generate the initrd file that you need. You may also be able to reinstall the kernel without building it, from the apt-get repositories.

All that aside, you need to find out why the file is missing. You mention that you once had to run fsck on boot in order to restore the system after some problem. Do you have power problems? Do you have a backup (battery powered) power supply? Is the system directly connected to the Internet, or do you have a firewall in place? Also, which version of Ubuntu are you running?

[Kabuthunk]

I continuously update the system whenever it brings up the update thing, so it's at 10.10 I believe. I'm connected to the internet through a router, and the computer is plugged in through a surge protector. Maybe the problem is caused by the fact that I tend not to shut down my computer at night. It usually gets rebooted once a week at least though.

Although, on bootup, it shows for a short period the text "Raid 1 set is in rebuild status", and indicates it will continue rebuild after the next boot. Rebooting several times (several hours apart) seems to do nothing. Strangely, on one boot, it said "Raid 1 set is in critical status", but after the next boot, went back to 'rebuild' status. I've tried picking a different build version, and the exact same type of screen comes up.

The 'fsck' that I ran a while back I apparently needed to do, because spontaneously, the computer decided to give the message "mount of filesystem failed" when booting up, seemingly for no reason that I could figure out. It's not like I'm doing bizarre things on the system.


Googling around seems to indicate that this is a hard-drive problem... which is highly annoying, since I specifically got dual hard drives to do a Raid 1 setup specifically to PREVENT the system from dying... I've gotten annoyed over the years when a hard drive failure killed everything.


So... unfortunately I'm not technically knowledgeable enough to be able to test hard drives to find out which is having problems, or both, or if I need to just say 'screw it' and format the hell out of everything again and reinstall (which isn't exactly a walk in the park... I swear reinstalling and setting up Ubuntu is as bad as doing so with Windows).

Thankfully, I must have had some strange glimmer of ESP or something, since about two days before it outright died, I decided it was about time I back up most of my crap onto SD cards. I'll lose a healthy chunk of music and some pictures, but nothing I can't live without.


I just thank god I have a dual-boot setup so that I can hop into Windows during these periods of Linux being stupid (and it's on a crappy, old, but different hard drive still). Too bad I've been trying to do away with Windows outright, but there's a scant few programs that I still use that I can't get to run through Wine.

I don't at the moment have a recovery USB stick, since a friend had helped install Ubuntu (I'm not all that particularly good with Linux, so most of what you suggested... reinstalling the kernel, etc... is way the hell over my head). However, since I can still access Windows, I should be able to find a place to download some kind of recovery thing and slap it on a USB stick or CD or something.