Thanks, Russell. That makes sense. Since I have only one physical drive, busybox appearing indicates to me that the drive was readable at least to some extent (I assume that busybox is on the drive, not in CMOS.) What could make one part of the drive readable yet not the rootfs?
A month or so ago I had a failure due to the HD not being read. It appears that the drive dock was the issue. The problem went away when the drive was plugged directly into the SATA cable. Could a similar connection issue be responsible for this latest issue? -Denis On Wed, Jan 13, 2016 at 12:59 AM, Russell Senior <[email protected]> wrote: > >>>>> "wes" == wes <[email protected]> writes: > > Denis> Afew days ago I started my Ubuntu 14.04 desktop system only to be > Denis> presented with "Busybox V1.21.1 (ubuntu 1:1.21.0 1ubuntu1) > Denis> builtin shell (ash) initramfs" > Denis> > Denis> Subsequent startings have been norma. > Denis> > Denis> Does this mean an intermittent hardware failure ? > > wes> There are a lot of things it could mean. Could be hardware or > wes> software. Are you positive you didn't have any removable media > wes> connected at the time which it may have attempted to boot from? > wes> Busybox is commonly found on devices with limited resources as a > wes> sort of basic operating environment. It may be used as a failsafe > wes> if the primary Ubuntu system is unable to boot, though I haven't > wes> seen that myself. > > The busybox you saw, Denis, is almost certainly the shell associated > with the initramfs that grub tried to boot. Generally, this is mounted > first, has enough modules and such to mount the rootfs so things can > keep going. For some reason, the system didn't think it could mount > the rootfs. > > > -- > Russell Senior, President > [email protected] > _______________________________________________ > PLUG mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug > _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
