Public bug reported:
Binary package hint: mountall
A month or so ago, I installed Ubuntu Karmic on my father's laptop in
Florida. I then flew back home to Boston.
He was running Windows in VirtualBox, and closed the laptop lid (i.e.
ACPI suspend). When he opened it, the system did not come up properly.
When he rebooted, the root filesystem failed to mount due to "unexpected
inconsistencies," and the boot process halted with the following:
Mount of filesystem failed.
A maintenance shell will now be started.
CONTROL-D will terminate this shell and re-try.
r...@hostname:~#
I spent the better part of a year talking him into trying Ubuntu on his
laptop. Even when the original Windows XP system took fifteen minutes to
boot up because of all the {spy,mal}ware, he hesitated. VirtualBox was
what finally sealed the deal. The above root prompt, staring him in the
face while I was some 1500 miles away, nearly got him looking at Windows
7 prices.
I had him type in "fsck -v -y /dev/sda2" yadda yadda. Corrupted inodes
were fixed, and in short order, the system was booting again normally.
Which left me asking, why on Earth did the system not do this for us?
Why did it give a computer-phobic user an unsolicited root prompt, when
"fsck -y" is what most experienced users would do at this point anyway?
I mean sure, let's not prevent the user from running debugfs(8) and
examining inodes if s/he wants, but can we do better for the kind of
user to whom I have to explain that the "r...@hostname" bit is an input
prompt?
Here is an example of something that would be just a little more newbie-
friendly:
Mount of filesystem failed.
Press F1 to attempt repair, F5 to start a maintenance shell (advanced users
only):
where F1 runs "fsck [-v] -y" on the filesystem. Advanced users can still
do whatever they want, and my dad gets more than a snowball's chance in
Hell of fixing the problem on his own.
(By the way, it would be helpful if the error message indicated _which_
filesystem could not be mounted. I hadn't been entirely clear at first
on whether it was the root or /home partition that was acting up.)
** Affects: mountall (Ubuntu)
Importance: Undecided
Status: New
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Need newbie-friendly alternative to maintenance shell when mount fails
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/489474
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