Ubuntu, BusyBox, Gave up waiting, Puppy Linux 
0 
0 
I'd been wondering about my somewhat flaky Systemax Quad system, running Ubuntu Studio on one disk, Windows XP on another. The computer seemed subject to overheating. Tonight I got home from work and found that my system wouldn't boot into Ubuntu. Instead, I eventually received this message:
Gave up waiting for root device. Common problems:
...
ALERT! /dev/... does not exist.
Dropping to a shell!
BusyBox Built In Shell ...
(initramfs)
A search for this situation fairly quickly located Bug #360378 in linux (Ubuntu): "Gave up waiting for root device after upgrade then busybox console". I scrolled down to steff's second 2009-11-05 post, where he says:
Well, since KUBUNTU 9.10 udev obviously doesn't recognize my disk and bristles to create an entry in '/dev/disk/by-uuid'! So I re-configured GRUB to use 'root=/dev/sda1' instead of the UUID. And voila, it works.
My problem then became to find some way whereby I could mount my own /dev/sda1 (which is where my root and boot directories are located) and get to the /boot/grub/grub.cfg file so I could make this change. I could mount /dev/sda1 from busybox, but I didn't find an editor there. I tried my old Knoppix 3.7, but it didn't recognize my /dev/sda1 as a block system (my /dev/sda1 is an ext4 file system). Finally, I searched for Linux Live CDs, and decided to try the latest Puppy Linux Version, 5.1.1. I downloaded the iso and made CD on another system, booted my failing system with Puppy Linux 5.1.1, and saw a /dev/sda1 icon on the Puppy Linux desktop. Clicking on the icon opened my /dev/sda1, and let me easily navigate to my grub.cfg file, and edit it.
I modified my "linux" boot command "root=" specifications to be:
root=/dev/sda1
Lo and behold, Steff's fix worked for me too!
Strange thing for me: my system was working fine when I powered down last night. Suddenly today it couldn't boot into Ubuntu and went to the in-memory BusyBox shell. But, as I said, I've considered my disk a bit flaky, so maybe a time out was happening using the UUID method of specifying the root disk, but going directly to the /dev/sda1 ID doesn't time out? Strange, but I'm back in business. So, I must close this entry and get back to work!
28 09 10 20:08 | | 
