[dundee] Ubuntu installation challenges!

[Adam Sampson]

brough colin <colin.brough at blueyonder.co.uk> writes:

> That makes sense. How might I gather stuff that's "off the top of the
> screen"? I've posted what I could see....

Shift+PageUp/PageDown will scroll up and down on the console. Scroll
Lock will pause it.

It sounds like your kernel is either not being able to mount the root
filesystem at all, or it's mounting the wrong filesystem.

The root filesystem is probably an initramfs on Ubuntu -- i.e. a little
stub filesystem that's installed along with the kernel, which can then
do complicated setup like mounting encrypted filesystems before exec-ing
into the real init. If so, it's a bit surprising that it's not finding
that; it might be something odd about how the bootloader's been
configured, e.g. there's an extra root= argument getting passed to the
kernel, or the initrd.img file is in the wrong place.

If you know where your root filesystem actually is, you could add
something like:
  root=/dev/sda1 init=/bin/sh
to the kernel args in the bootloader, which should drop you into a shell
and allow you to fix things. Or you could boot off a rescue image.

-- 
Adam Sampson <ats at offog.org>                         <http://offog.org/>