Sunday, January 8, 2012

Fixing 'initramfs error' boot Problem in Linux.

Yesterday, I faced initramfs boot error on my Linux Mint 9 box. I don't know what went wrong, but I remember that I forced restart my system, as it was not responding. It hung up in a command line terminal. I changed the terminal (ctrl+alt+[f1-f6]), and then unable to get back to the GUI (ctrl+alt+f7). The screen was showing some weird software error.
Code:
No init found. Try passing init= boot arg
BusyBox v1.10.2 (Ubuntu 1:1.10.2.2ubuntu7) built-in shell (ash)
(initramfs)


As I was unable to proceed any further, I pressed the power switch. After booting it, I was caught in the initramfs problem. I shook my head; what the heck is this, seen it first time. Trying some commands was of no use. So, then I tried to boot it by pen-drive and fix the issue. I did some search about the error, got something really useful.
I booted by my pen-drive, but I cannot have root access in Linux Mint live cd. Again, I made a bootable pen-drive using Gparted, but again I was stopped by an error. I tried 2-3 more times with different stuffs.
The problem was, I was not getting a terminal with root access. So, at last I used my final weapon, BackTrack live cd. It's the most sought hacking/cracking live cd. I installed it on my pen-drive, and BOOM I got the root login. Now, nothing more was needed.
Executed,   
#fdisk -l /dev/sda
This gave me the listing of all partitions, ext2/ext3/ext4 drives for Linux. Now, look for the drive creating problem.
ext3/ext4 are marked by id 83. Now, did this,   
#fsck -yv /dev/sda7
You have to see it by yourself, that the problem is in which partition, mine was in sda7. fsck command just checks the filesystem for errors. In my case, the problem was the partition was locked due to accidental shutdown, and the boot loader was not able to access my init ram file which is needed during bootup.
After executing the command, I saw some errors getting fixed and filesystem repaired. At the end, I rebooted and my Linux Mint was again back to life.

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