Comment 22 for bug 110138

FYI:

I've upgraded from 6.06 to 8.04 (that's dapper to hardy) and had this problem.

I had the same fsck error as reported above. At the maintenance shell mount -a mounted all the parititions and them CTRL+D would continue to boot.

In short, my /dev/sda1 is /boot. The fstab was updated with UUIDs. But blkid reported a short UUID and the wrong filesystem for this partition:
blkid /dev/sda1
/dev/sda1: UUID="7EFA-09BD" SEC_TYPE="msdos" TYPE="vfat"

This doesn't make sense because /dev/sda1 is ext3:
fdisk /dev/sda
   Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 31 248976 83 Linux

findfs reported correctly with a short UUID, but would not with the longer UUID:
findfs UUID="7EFA-09BD"
/dev/sda1
findfs UUID="a1a3a3ef-cea0-4230-8098-070febf47f80"
findfs: Unable to resolve 'UUID=a1a3a3ef-cea0-4230-8098-070febf47f80'

However, fstab had this longer UUID=a1a3a3ef-cea0-4230-8098-070febf47f80 and worked fine with mount -a.

Following Theodore Tso's advice from bug #66032, over here:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/e2fsprogs/+bug/66032

I used dd on that partition and it all works swimmingly now that fsck uses that longer UUID and blkid reports correctly:
blkid /dev/sda1
/dev/sda1: LABEL="/boot" UUID="a1a3a3ef-cea0-4230-8098-070febf47f80" SEC_TYPE="ext2" TYPE="ext3"