General error mounting filesystems

[tonytraductor]

I don't understand how anyone can sudo apt-get or sudo aptitude ot sudo dpkg ANYTHING when this mountall error comes up.

I'm getting
mountall: invalid option: --tmptime=0
General failure to mount filesystems

I get dropped to the root terminal.
Everything appears to be mounted, oddly, but all in READ ONLY,
so I am completely unable to alter anything, dkpg anything, aptitude anything, etc.

I'm kind of lost here.

Also, a googling of the above mountall error (tmptime=0) gives me nothing.

Anyone?

thanks
tony

For some reason, I can't edit my post, so I'm quoting it.

I just wanted to add, I think it's pretty clear here that my issue is not a grub problem.
I imagine there is something in the mountall configs or something that I should be editing, but, of course, since everything it mounted read-only, I can't.
Trying to see if I can get in there using my 9.10 live-usb and edit stuff...
Of course, at this moment, I don't know what needs editing, yet, and, as mentioned, googling my specific error is not helping.
man mountall and mountall --help were completely useless, too.

[djberndt]

@tonytraductor

A friend had the exact same problem in carmic. Couldnt mount anything, or edit anything since since read-only.

I solved it by typing (in root shell):

mount -n -o remount,rw /
aptitude --configure -a
xinit

this made me login to x and backup all data (since it was an encrypted ext4 with lost password). after that I just reinstalled ubuntu.

Hope it helped =)