vbox and lucid upgrade - mountall: file system could not be mounted

[Tracy Rosen]

I just upgraded to the latest development release (March 21, 2010, 12:30 pm est) of lucid from karmic. The upgrade process went smoothly until the restart,

I see the Dell splash, then I get this message and it does not go any further.

"Mount: mount point /proc/bus/usb does not exist
Mountall: mount /proc/bus/usb [351] terminated with status 32
Mountall: filesystem could not be mounted: /proc/bus/usb"

I did a hard shut down and was met with the same message.

Has anyone seen this and what should I do?

I used update-manager -d to upgrade

My computer is a dell inspiron laptop 1525

As it is now my computer can not boot.

[Dak Ralter (dak.ralter)]

I had this problem on my machine when I upgraded from 9.10 to 10.04 alpha, so I just re-installed a small 10.04 partition and I kept my /home directory on a separate partition so I just used the new 10.04 partition. Now I ran updates and I'm getting this error as well, so unless I reinstall I'm locked out of both partitions. Can't boot into recovery mode either.

[Tracy Rosen (tracy-leadingfromtheheart)]

Apparently this is affecting virtual box users.
From the ubuntu forums:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=9007997#post9007997

"It seems that this will affect VBox users. Per user "setuid" in #ubuntu+1, he advised I boot from a livecd, comment out the following in /etc/fstab:
Code:

none /proc/bus/usb usbfs devgid=124,devmode=664 0 0

Which I did and now I can boot into both installations. This makes sense because it wasn't until today that I wanted to utilize USB functionality in my VM's and I followed the VirtualBoxUSB Guide in the community docs. I don't know what the procedure is for notifying VBox users of this situation but if someone will either do it or advise me then I'll do it. That guide should probably have an annotation regarding rebooting as well."

[Tracy Rosen (tracy-leadingfromtheheart)]

Does commenting out that code via live cd allow me to maintain my computer's original settings? From what I understood what you do in a live cd doesn't save.

Is there a fix for this without a fresh install?

[Scott James Remnant (Canonical) (canonical-scott)]

This sounds like you don't have Plymouth installed? You should have seen a graphical or text-based splash screen on boot, not that error message

[Dak Ralter (dak.ralter)]

Yes just comment out the line in fstab. At this time I'm not sure how to uncomment it and boot safely. I really hope you were joking about the remark you made: "From what I understood what you do in a live cd doesn't save" but just in case - you edit the /etc/fstab file on your hard drive, not the one on the livecd...

[Dak Ralter (dak.ralter)]

Scott - Plymouth has nothing to do with this.

[Wladimir Mutel (mwg)]

Right today (April 05th 2010) I had the same behaviour. On physical, non-virtual iron (some G31/G33 motherboard)
How to reproduce it :
1. Install Ubuntu 9.10 at its initial version (this creates /proc/bus/usb line in fstab)
2. Update to Ubuntu 10.04 through update-manager -d
3. Reboot the system

Result : after mounting most of filesystems listed in fstab, the system hangs indefinitely (don't know how long to wait but it is rebootable via ctrl-alt-del).

Fix: boot from another media (LiveCD, USB drive), access root filesystem and comment out /proc/bus/usb line in /etc/fstab

This seems to be closely related to mountall. May be it is worth to include fstab-fixing logic into update-manager or what ...