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I was on my computer and running updates and something about firefox kicked me to a text screen from which I was forced to do a hardware reboot. On reboot, plymouth should low graphics mode and displayed a message saying that it cannot find / and I could wait or open a terminal for manual recovery.

Waiting does nothing. FSTAB is in order. fsck has been run.

The only clue of where I might go from here is given from when I ran this:

$ sudo touch /forcefsck
touch: cannot touch '/forcefsck': Read-only file system

Are there any suggestions?

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2 Answers 2

up vote 3 down vote accepted

It seems your system was corrupted somehow - quite possible due to a hardware problem or a power spike.

Without hands on the system its unlikely that someone can diagnose your problem and if you can't do recovery by yourself (and possibly any way) your best bet is to reinstall your system from scratch.

Start by loading Ubuntu from live CD, access your harddrive from the live session and backup all your important data to an external drive or a network share. Then start a new installation and format your drive.

If it happens again then its very likely a hardware problem and you should get your computer to be checked by a professional.

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That is currently my best (and last option) that I will more than likely end up going with. Thank you, I suspected as much, just was hoping something better might be in the works. –  ShroudedCloud Apr 14 '11 at 16:43

Choose the terminal option then do:

cat /proc/cmdline

Look for the root=UUID=XXXX part in the cmdline, and see if blkid recognizes any partition as having that UUID.

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It does recognize it. –  ShroudedCloud Apr 14 '11 at 17:47

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