Ubuntu 12.04 failing to boot

Question

Can someone please help?

I have been using Ubuntu 12.04 perfectly fine for the past 3 months. For no apparent reason it is failing to boot and I am getting the following messages just before the login screen appears:

*Stopping save kernel messages                [ok]
*Starting CUPS printing spooler/server        [ok]
*Stopping anac(h)ronistic cron                [ok] 
*Stopping System V runlevel compatibility     [ok]

The process stops here and I can only turn off the machine by holding down on the start button.

I have a dual boot on my laptop with Windows 7 and this works fine.

I would be grateful for some advise on this as I need to access my Ubuntu files as soon as possible.

Many thanks in advance!

Solution

This is a strange step to freeze on boot, may be you made an update but not finished correctly? Please make try these steps :

• Boot from Any Ubuntu ISO file with an USB stick or DVD. If you don't have one anymore, you can prepare an USB stick with this process http://www.ubuntu.com/download/help/create-a-usb-stick-on-windows
• Boot with the live USB or CD, choose "try ubuntu without install it".

Once ready, open terminal and type the following commands

sudo -s
fdisk -l

Try now to identify the partition where your Ubuntu is installed. Usually, the partition is named /dev/sdax, where x is the number of the partition. By example, my hard drive has

/dev/sda3           20923       23507    20755980   83  Linux

You see 83 Linux that's mean the partition /dev/sda3 is formated under Linux (ext4). If you have several Linux partition, you will need probably try the steps bellow several time until you find the partition where Ubuntu is installed.

Now mount the partition like that

mount /dev/sda3 /mnt

Check if it's the right partition

ls /mnt/etc/fstab

If the file exist, you have probably mounted the right partition. Now we will try to fix the Ubuntu installed.

mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev
mount --bind /proc /mnt/proc
mount --bind /sys /mnt/sys
chroot /mnt
apt-get -f install
apt-get clean

If updates was not complete before, the process should be started again and finish the updates. If these steps doesn't fix your issue, check also if you don't have space issue with the following command when your linux partition stills mounted.

df -h

In last resort, you can try to place the few last line of the /mnt/var/log/syslog file content, this may help to identify where is the issue.

Good luck.

Comments

[MadMike]

Consider doing Alt + REISUB instead of a forcefull shutdown.