Unable to mount after Narwhal upgrade

Over the weekend Ubuntu prompted me to upgrade to Nutty Narwhal (thats version 11.04), and once I decided I didn’t need to be doing anything on it for a while I set it downloading/installing.

As you would expect with an OS upgrade, there was a hefty amount of files to download but it was all handled (as usual) very easily by the Ubuntu magic in the background. Now being a man who doesn’t actually perform a system shutdown or reboot for days, I didn’t notice any problems until I finally performed a restart this morning.

On boot I was presented with a newly populated GRUB menu, with the usual distro, safe mode and memtest settings. Choosing the top one, I kicked back on another machine and waited for my Ubuntu laptop to load in to Narwhal.

Disaster! After the GRUB screen the screen reported that the root folder couldn’t be mounted, infact the errors were:

init: udevtrigger main process terminated
init: udevmonitor main process terminated
Disk Drive not ready yet or not available

I had options to wait, skip, or manually recover.

None of these fixed the error by itself (surprise surprise). However after performing quite a lot of searching on Google, I found the following to be my solution. Select the manual option then enter:

mount -o remount, rw /
dpkg --configure -a

(Thats double hyphen before configure)

Reconfiguring the package manager took a very long time, but its 95% all automatic and just requires time and little user input. I had to select some options, to update GRUB screen I think it was, and some old defunct Apache folders, but thats probably just my machine.

Then type CTRL + D and the shell will exit and reboot.

Anyway after running those commands the system is now up in 11.04, with no problems at all. The OS runs smoother and it even upgraded a few other bits of software too (Such as Firefox to V4, which is a lot faster and smoother to use)

Hope this helps some people who are searching for this error.