12.04 LTS Desktop dies after installing Hibernate

[shukuboy]

Hi guys,

I just freshly installed 12.04 LTS Desktop version on my laptop, and managed to install all my apps and get everything working fine which took me over a day.

It was all honky dory until I installed hibernate from Synaptic, and rebooted to set the power-options ( hibernate on closing the laptop lid ), but I never saw the light of Ubuntu's day again.

After the reboot, in failsafe mode I get the following message

Begin: Running /script/local-premount ... resume: libcrypt version: 1.5.0 
resume: Could not stat the resume device file /dev/dm-0 Please type in  the full path name to try again or press enter to boot the system

At this point the boot crashes and pressing ENTER or entering a path does not do anything.

I have a working linux (different distro) on my laptop which I can use to go through the Ubuntu installation on filesystem and possibly make minor changes, but have no clue how to fix this.

Some random facts which may or may not be relevant is :

• 64bit installation,
• using a solid state hard drive,
• have encrypted my ubuntu home directory (ticked the option when installing)
• /dev/dm-0 does not exist under my Ubuntu drive

Any help would be kindly appreciated.

Thanks,

[shukuboy]

A wise man once said when $hit really hits the fans, the best thing to do is absolutely nothing and wait until help comes from above. And this is almost what I ended up doing to rescue the poor system.

Unfortunately for me, there were no older versions of the kernel which I could resort to, like our friend here ( http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1970589 ). Nor did I have a live CD or anything that could magically recover the system. So here's what I did:

1. Installed the same version of Ubuntu with all the same settings, on a portable hard drive.
2. Booted into another linux version, this could very well have been the installation image on my USB. But since I had another distro I logged into that.
3. Opened the terminal, logged in as root and mounted both the broken ubuntu drive, and the new version on the portable hard-drive.
4. Copied the vmlinuz and initrd images from the portable media (under /boot directory) to the same location on the broken ubuntu drive. In my case these were initrd.img-3.2.0-23-generic and vmlinuz-3.2.0-23-generic. It's important you override the images linked to from vmlinuz and initrd.img files in the root (or you go into grub.cfg and point the entries to your new images).
5. Then I could boot normally again, remove the hibernate package and install new kernel updates.

After that I could boot into the kernel and get on with life. All the apps I had installed and configured previously are there and working normally.

There are other alternatives to this approach which could be a lot better, easier or more proper. This just worked for me as all I needed was a portable hard-drive.


Au revoir