I have been playing around with my systems, understanding their benefits, and in the process, broke them to a small extent. There are no howstos that I could refer to and there was no knowledge of what failed and why. All I had was a sense of exploration.
When there is a problem, there is always a solution. All it takes is a little patience and SLOW reading. OF course, you can just reinstall the system if you like and do things the long and cheap way, if you have backups. However, the best part about living is to challenge yourself. Now, I don’t usually do things via command line, but with a little exposer, the only thing in the way is time.
To start things off, one of my ubuntu systems was in the updating process. It finished with no errors, as usual. A day later, the system would not boot. All I got was the grub2> prompt. I figured there had to be something wrong with the file system. The /var/log was viewed and from the last line read, the “init” was missing. Assuming that all I had to do was replace it, this did not sound easy. I did a little digging around and uncovered some information about installing the kernel. The instructions unfortunately were not easy to follow.
With little choice, it was decided to just do it. Before the installation of the kernel was initiated, there was one method I did not try, running fsck.
When the update was executing something was accidently misplaced. Which means, the file system needs to be restructured. I booted my PC by using a liveCD of my distro, mounted the partition of my OS and ran #sudo fsck /dev/sdx1.
Once that finished, the system said that all was finished with not errors. I booted my system with my hard drive and all was well.
In conclusion, when faced with a system failure, remember the last thing you did before it happened, ALWAYS. Then read the syslog in /var/log folder to get more details on what happened. Understanding what the log says, you can take the more appropriate route into repairing your system. NOTE: If the system says it is missing something, and you did not delete anything, simply, as your first step, run fsck on your partition.
I will return with another howto.
