/bin/sh: Can't access tty; Job control turned off

[Styan]

I've searched and tried many methods that are already listed on these boards to no avail. Any help appreciated! Thanks in advance!

So tonight I decided to update my 6.06 box to 6.10. Boy was that a mistake!

Using the foolproof updater (gksu "update-manager -c") command I waited 3 hours for all of the actions to complete, and I'm told to restart. Ok no problem, ... dapper shuts down, and up comes the new splash screen. The progress bar makes it about 1/8th of an inch across the screen and wham! I get this:

BusyBox v1.1.3 (Debian 1:1.1.3-2ubuntu3) Built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

/bin/sh: can't access tty; job control turned off
(initramfs)

My commands at this interface are very limited and theres not much I can do. (That I know anything about.)

If I press CTRL+ALT+F1, I see the following:

  Booting 'Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.17-10-386'

root (hd0,0)
Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83
kernel /boot/vmliniz-2.6.17-10-386 root=uuid=9c4db707-6051-46b2-8dd6-3f7c7ae0fb95 ro quiet splash
  [Linux-bxImage, setup=0x1c00, size=0x17e851]
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.17-10-386
  [Linux-initrd @ 0x1f976000, 0x6791c0 bytes]
savedefault
boot
mount: Mounting /root/dev on /dev/.static/dev failed: No such file or directory
mount: Mounting /sys on /root/sys failed: No such file or directory
mount: Mounting /proc on /root/proc failed: No such file or directory
Target filesystem doesn't have /sbin/init

There are no other CTRL+ALT+F# combos other than F1 and F8 (F8 returns me to the (initramfs) prompt.

Any insight on to what I can do to get this box back up and running would be great! (Hopefully without having to re-install.)

Thanks,
Styan

[K.Mandla]

Hmm. I had thought this problem was confined to live CD installs. This is the first time I've ever heard of it after an upgrade.

I don't know if you've seen this thread already, but supposedly someone fixed this problem there.

http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=279884

Edit: It might just be that Grub is pointing at the wrong partition, but I still suspect is the changeover in tty handling that happened between Dapper and Edgy. Just thinking out loud, I guess. ...

[Styan]

I'll have a go again at that thread when I get home.

My issue is when I'm at the (initramfs) prompt, an 'ls' doesn't show any files from my hard drive's file system. So maybe grub is pointing to the wrong place... Which then (perhaps a stupid question) where do I go to check to see where it's pointing? is that in the inittab file??

The other thing I've read about is for some the i386 kernel works and others it doesn't and the same for the generic kernel. If I look where I think the kernels are... I only see the i386 one.

Very confused! Like I said, I'll take a stab at the options in that thread when I get home and post my results.

Styan

[Matthewb57]

I'm not very technical with linux yet, but I can get things to work sometimes. I had this same issue except mine came about in a different way. The only thing I noticed was mine just happened one time after I rebooted my computer after I "resumed" it from sleeping and things were screwed up (I have a laptop).

After the reboot I had those above issues. I was playing around, trying some things like others stated in other posts. What I found was that everything was intact on my partition. I could mount it, search all files, and they were all there. Booting from a live CD I checked again, and yes, everything looked good.

Anyways, I tried manually booting though grub (using commands) which showed successful, except when the kernel was booted. So I figured maybe the kernel was screwed up somehow. After verifying I could mount the drive successfully all the time I decided to just copy the kernel off the live cd and then proceeded to boot from that kernel (which would be the older one in my grub).

And here I am now posting this post. So this worked... I do have to now get the latest kernel working again that my system has which is:
2.6.15-27-386

The one I copied was 2.6.15-26-386 off the live CD. Maybe the corruption happened with an upgrade to that kernel somewhere... I don't know. All I know is both 2.6.15-27-386 and 2.6.15-26-386 residing on my hd were somehow corrupt or something. Selecting regular or "recovery" proved unsuccessful

What I'm going to do now is restart and try loading the new kernel again (without deleting and modifying yet) and see if I have the same issue. If I do, I'll look at removing it and getting the update again.

Hope this helps someone...and I'll post my results shortly

-Matt
Ubuntu 6.06

[Matthewb57]

Okay...so now my other kernel (2.6.15-27-386) is working fine too (just booted and I'm posting this post right after). Weird... could something have been corrupted based on a crash of my system and then restored after one successful boot using that live cd copied kernel?

Anybody have any ideas about this?

Well, everything is okay now. Don't know whether the solution above can really help, but the only thing I did was the above and it worked right after. No harm in trying...

Good luck!

[K.Mandla]

Strange stuff. I wish I could reproduce this error so I could tinker with it.

If you can describe what you did to work around this issue, the folks who find a bug report for it might thank you.

https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu....17/+bug/59792

Cheers and thanks.

[Styan]

Alright! It was the same issue as in one of the previous threads, where the GRUB was pointing here: root=/by-uid/[whole bunch of hex code] rather than: root=/dev/hda1 just edited the line to show /dev/hda1

Prior to my post here, I had no idea how to get into the Grub ... so I started randomly hitting keys (like you do F8 for getting into the windows "grub" lol) btw, for ubuntu its 'esc'

Thanks for all your help guys! Hopefully this will help anyone else with the problem.

[tech9]

Originally Posted by K.Mandla Strange stuff. I wish I could reproduce this error so I could tinker with it. If you can describe what you did to work around this issue, the folks who find a bug report for it might thank you. https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu....17/+bug/59792 Cheers and thanks.

To recreate this error,

backup the entire system with this command...

tar cvpzf backup.tgz --exclude=/etc/fstab --exclude=/proc --exclude=/lost+found --exclude=/backup.tgz --exclude=/mnt --exclude=/sys /

rebuild your PC with Ubuntu; delete and create new partitions & format...

then run this restore command....

tar xvpfz backup.tgz -C / to restore

Finally reboot the system and you will get this error...

/bin/sh: can't access tty; job control turned off
(initramfs)

[Hollunder]

Hi,
I'm in the same initial situation as Styan (upgrade from 6.06 to 6.10) and I get the same error: /bin/sh: can't access tty; job control turned off

What I did:
I checked menu.lst and it pointed to the wrong place (0,2 instead of 0,1)
I already corrected this, so it's not the problem.

I checked /bin and I found:
sh [pointing to] dash
as well as
sh.distrib [pointing to] bash

I'm rather new to ubuntu, so I don't exactly know what's going on. I guess it could be some bash/dash-problem.

Any help is appreciated.

[captgadget]

I just encountered this same problem and I had a USB Flash Drive in at the same time. I removed the flash drive and it booted right up. So I guess you might check for that.