Boot stuck somewhere before starting X server

[Jeroen T. Vermeulen]

I've upgraded my laptop from Karmic to the Lucid beta. I just had another ext4 problem send my filesystem into read-only, as has been happening for the past few months.

This time it looks as if the forced fsck on boot may have started automatically, which would be good. But the only visual feedback is that I get to look at the Ubuntu logo and animated dots for a lot longer. I can't tell if an fsck is really in progress. There's nothing on the text consoles, and it's taking suspiciously long.

[Jeroen T. Vermeulen (jtv)]

After well over an hour of this (much longer than a normal forced fsck) I interrupted and tried to boot into a shell. That didn't give me a working keyboard (bug 553400) so I tried leaving the system to boot by itself again. For a while I could get a brief flash of text output whenever I pressed ctrl-alt-F1. It said something about the / filesystem having errors, and something about udev that would change in a future version. It went too fast to read.

[Philip Muškovac (yofel)]

fsck on boot is done by mountall.

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

There is certainly visual notification of fsck

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

From the sounds of your second comment, I don't think you had an fsck at all, but your machine is simply failing to boot

If you press Escape - what messages do you see on screen at this point?

If nothing, try booting without "splash" and "quiet" on the kernel command-line, and with --verbose instead

[Jeroen T. Vermeulen (jtv)]

@scott: you're right, it's not fsck'ing after all—I left it running overnight and saw no change. This is getting a bit worrying because the old init=/bin/sh trick isn't working either, even with the oldest kernel I have installed.

Pressing esc (amazing I hadn't tried this) gives me a legible text console. It says:

{{{
fsck from util-linux-ng 2.17.2
/dev/sda3 contains a file systetm with errors, check forced.
/dev/sda3: Inodes that were part of a corrupted orphan linked list found.

/dev/sda3: UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY; RUN fsck MANUALLY.
              (i.e., without -a or -p options)
mountall: fsck / [382] terminated with status 4
mountall: Filesystem has errors: /
udevd[392]: SYSFS{}= will be removed in a future udev version, please use ATTR{}= to match the event device, or ATTRS{}= to match a parent device, in /etc/udev/rules.d/isight.rules:1
}}}

I guess the udev warning is about the webcam config.

So it did try to fsck, but fsck punted to the user and the user didn't get to see the message. I'll have to bake a boot CD using my other machine and boot from that for a manual fsck. (To make matters worse, this other machine is having network trouble and after a Karmic upgrade also went into read-only just now :-/ )

[Jeroen T. Vermeulen (jtv)]

wgrant suggested breaking into the initrd shell. That works, but doesn't give me an fsck binary.

[Jeroen T. Vermeulen (jtv)]

Ah yes, the --verbose boot. Here's all the output in the surviving backscroll when I do that on the latest Lucid kernel (I don't suppose there's any way to copy this stuff directly under the circumstances):

{{{
init: ureadahead main process (377) became new process (380)
init: ureadahead state changed from spawned to post-start
init: ureadahead state changed from post-start to running
init: mountall state changed from starting to pre-start
init: mountall state changed from pre-start to spawned
init: mountall main process (381)
init: Handling started event
init: mountall main process (381) executable changed
init: Connection from private client
init: mountall main process (381) became new process (382)
init: mountall main process (382) became new process (383)
init: mountall state changed from spawned to post-start
init: mountall state changed from post-start to running
init: Handling started event
init: Handling mounted event
init: Handling mounted event
init: Handling mounted event
init: mounted-dev goal changed from stop to start
init: mounted-dev state changed from waiting to starting
init: Handling starting event
init: mounted-dev state changed from starting to pre-start
init: mounted-dev state changed from pre-start to spawned
init: mounted-dev main process (384)
init: mounted-dev state changed from spawned to post-start
init: mounted-dev state changed from post-start to running
init: Handling started event
init: mounted-dev main process (384) exited normally
init: mounted-dev goal changed from start to stop
init: mounted-dev state changed from running to stopping
init: Handling stopping event
init: mounted-dev state changed from stopping to killed
init: mounted-dev state changed from killed to post-stop
init: mounted-dev state changed from post-stop to waiting
init: Handling stopped event
init: Handling mounted event
init: Handling mounted event
init: Handling mounting event
init: Handling mounted event
init: Handling mounting event
init: Handling mounted event
init: Handling mounting event
init: Handling mounted event
init: Handling mounting event
init: Handling mounted event
init: Handling mounting event
init: Handling mouninit: Handling module-device-added event
init: Handling drivers-device-added event
init: Handling pci-device-added event
init: Handling sound-device-added event
init: Handling sound-device-added event
init: Handling sound-device-added event
init: Handling sound-device-added event
init: Handling sound-device-added event
init: Handling sound-device-added event
init: Handling sound-device-added event
init: Handling sound-device-added event
init: Handling sound-device-added event
init: Handling sound-device-added event
init: Handling sound-device-changed event
init: udevtrigger post-stop process (458) exited normally
init: udevtrigger state changed from post-stop to waiting
init: Handling stopped event
init: udevmonitor goal changed from start to stop
init: udevmonitor state changed from running to pre-stop
init: udevmonitor state changed from pre-stop to stopping
init: Handling stopping event
init: udevmonitor state changed from stopping to killed
init: Sending TERM signal to udevmonitor main process (433)
init: udev...

[Jeroen T. Vermeulen (jtv)]

I recovered my system by doing a manual fsck from a live CD, so I won't be able to provide much more debugging information on the problem.

[gonssal (gonssal)]

This just happened to me today after trying to update my system. Its system breaking and it leaves it unusable.

Disrregard upstart or something, this is not acceptable in a production system.

[shankao (shankao)]

Could be something that went wrong with the upgrade to lucid? Would be nice if someone adds the logfiles contained in your /var/log/dist-upgrade/ folder.
Thanks!

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for update-manager (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]