In trying to get a $10 adapter cable to work on the laptop, I hit a rare Linux bug. And the system, she go booom. Wouldn’t boot in normal mode, nor in recovery mode. Same ‘small’ problem; pretty much couldn’t find the hard drive.
It was nothing to do with the cable per se.
Actually it was, bizzarely, claiming it couldn’t find Mimix. Which is a totally different operating system! I knew the (one and only) disk was there okay as it was a dual boot and Windows XP was fine. So it had to be something else.
Turns out “In the fstype tool there is a problem if the lower 16 bit of number of free inodes in a ext3 filesystem happens to match minix filesystem magic.
This will cause the system not to boot since ubuntu will attempt to mount the filesystem as a minix filesystem.”
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/archive/…p/t-95729.html
I got around it via these steps (safely recorded here – and elsewhere – if it happens again):
- Boot a Live CD of Ubuntu (5.1 ok)
- set root password (sudo passwd root)
- mount /dev/hda1 as /root
- cd /root then cd to (say) /tmp dir
- create a junk.txt and put some data in it
- save it, shutdown Ubuntu, remove live cd and reboot
And it worked.