Linux help needed

[Firebottle]

Antone in the West Midlands with Linux experience?

My PC won't 'mount' the filesystem and my programming is non-existent. I can run it in recovery mode but that all. Anyone help?

[Light Dependant Resistor]

Hi Alan
Can help, but I am in New Zealand.

Which Linux distribution are you running ?

Your issue looks quite likely a partition is assigned wrongly
requiring firstly gparted, to see what partitions you have.

If you have the operating system running in recovery mode I would
straight away apply updates, as updates will repair a Grub issue ( Grand Unified Booting )
and get your system running again. At the prompts during update Say Yes to the package maintainers updated file

But if its regressed more than that I would In recovery mode, download an iso image from linuxmint (cinnammon is great)
http://www.linuxmint.com The reason for this is you can always get your computer running
if you have linux mint on a USB drive. gparted is also provided with this. http://gparted.org/screenshots.php

You should see ext4 journal assigned to Linux

A common fault is for a drive not to be assigned and it can be assigned in gparted
usually with a flag like this /

In Bios using in older systems F2 you can see the boot order, and other Bios settings
but older Bios F12 will take you straight to Boot order. in more modern systems
F10 gets you to Bios. To exit from Bios is F10 and exit saving changes

I recently repaired a computer with a windows partition resident on what was assigned as sda/5
it caused Grub to stop - which is worse than the issue you have. I managed to repair
it from a shell called ramfs.

Hope I can help further.

Cheers / Chris

[Firebottle]

Chris that's brilliant, I'll see how far I can get.

It was working OK then just started to hang up before full boot up, as if possibly a spot on the hard drive had failed?

[Firebottle]

I get 'filesystem cannot be mounted' with whatever route I try to get it to work.
My programming knowledge for linux is zero so i need an expert to look at it.

[ReggieB]

It does sound like failing sectors on the hard disk. Looks like good advice from Chris - Mint is a great distro.

[Audio Al]

Does it have remote access ?

[jostber]

If it is Ubuntu that you are using go to the "Use Recovery mode" section at this page:

https://www.howtogeek.com/196740/how-to-fix-an-ubuntu-system-when-it-wont-boot/

Then run the fsck option. Wait till finished, reboot and check if that works.

You can also run the dpkg option to check if this fixes it.