2

I have an old PC with dual boot to Windows Vista (Windows fails to boot though because of an unrepaired avgidshx.sys issue, another story), and on this PC I attempted an upgrade from Ubuntu 13.10 to 14.04 using the Software Updater. But the upgrade process froze midway. I had to restart the PC, and an error screen then showed The disk drive for /tmp is not ready yet or not present. Leaving it from here resulted in an unresponsive black screen, whereas SHIFT + m started a bash shell. From the bash shell:

  • $ ls -ld /tmp showed these permissions: drwxrwxrwt

  • /tmp listed in a green colour (because of its executable perms?) and it contained some data.

  • I couldn't move or re-create /tmp and:

    $ rm -rf /tmp
Cannot remove '...': Read-only file system

  • I couldn't remount /tmp either:

    $ mount -o remount,rw /tmp
/tmp not mounted or bad option

  • I couldn't check for matching blkid's because cat /etc/fstab contained no UUIDS.

  • I tried running fsck /tmp but that didn't work either (I don't remember the error message, but it might have recommended trying e2fsck)

My question to the community: is this PC beyond repair, or, how can it be salvaged?

I have a Boot Repair Disc obtained from http://sourceforge.net/p/boot-repair/home/Home/ which, when run, reports the problem is repaired & that I may reboot. But on rebooting I return to the /tmp is not ready yet screen.

amc
  • 7,142
hal
  • 21
  • Try this http://askubuntu.com/questions/454037/disk-drive-boot-problem/454214#454214 – TuKsn May 07 '14 at 12:52
  • Hi Simptnon, yes I did try mv /tmp /tmp_bac which failed. That's what I meant by saying I couldn't move or re-create /tmp whoami showed I was already running as root - didn't use sudo – hal May 07 '14 at 13:51

1 Answers1

0

Even if you could mount /tmp, it looks like fstab is broken, your system is in a partial upgrade state, and the filesystem may have some problems. You could try to fix all of that, but it would be far easier to just do a fresh install on a new partition, then fsck the old partition, and mount it to access any files you care about (ie. /home/hal).

bain
  • 11,260