"General error mounting filesystems" why trying to use the recovery menu

[Māris Fogels]

Binary package hint: mountall

When trying to boot into the recovery console from GRUB, the system will load, draw the recovery menu options, then throw a "General error mounting filesystems" message on the screen, and drop into a maintenance shell. The error message and maintenance shell prompt are drawn right in the middle of the screen, but the prompt is not usable. The recovery menu is not usable either. You must use control-alt-delete to restart the system.

This happens when trying to use both the 2.6.31-14-generic and 2.6.31-15-generic recovery options.

Booting the kernel with runlevel "s" or "single" takes you to the recovery menu, and this error is triggered.

Booting the kernel with runlevel "1" does *not* trigger the error. The recovery menu functions as normal.

Description: Ubuntu 9.10
Release: 9.10
Architecture: amd64
mountall package version: 1.0

My drive configuration when using runlevel "1 S":

$ mount
/dev/mapper/vg01-lvol.ubuntu on / type ext3 (rw,errors=remount-ro)
/dev/mapper/vg01-lvol.home on /home type reiserfs (rw)
/dev/sda1 on /boot type ext3 (rw)
... (proc, devfs,etc.) ...

In the runlevel 1 recovery menu, using the root shell, my swap space can not be mounted. It should be available on /dev/sda2. "swapon -a" returns the following error:

$ swapon -a
swapon: cannot find the device for UUID=4cd762ff-c517-4301-87d3-6ea785917e63

[Grzegorz Śliwiński (fizyk)]

Same thing happens to me on my server installation on virtual machine.
I've installed it using LVM and encrypted home folder, and general error mounting filesystem appears mostly when I edit some configuration file as sudo

[kautilya (jedezhath)]

Hello Everyone,

Has there been any progress with this bug. I am unable to log into Karmic for the past 2-3 weeks (after a software update) because of this "General error mounting..."

I have tried most of the suggestions (chrooting and updating the system, editing the grub line, etc.) but to no avail.
Thanks

[Māris Fogels (mars)]

kautilya, may I ask what your reason is for marking this bug as Invalid? This really appears to be a bug in mountall, or some related system: converting it to a question does not fix the issue.