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I'm using a persistent live USB version of Ubuntu 13.04. Recently it crashed while I was using it. When I restarted I couldn't get past the Ubuntu logo with the sequentially flashing dots anymore.

Using variations of Control + Alt + F1, escape and by booting into nomodeset I have gathered this information that may help.

I cannot get to a console, I can get to here:

I don't know how to proceed.

edit:

I've viewed the files using another Ubuntu machine, it seems the drive is ok?

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That looks to me like filesystem damage - the first screenshot show an IO error while trying to rename /etc/apt/sources.list.new, and the third screenshot shows a lot of ext2 errors. It probably can't boot because it can't write to its filesystem.

What exactly is your goal?

  • If you need to recover important data from the persistence image:

    Boot a working Linux and look directly at the persistence image; it should be named casper-rw. It may be possible to mount it or to repair it with fsck.ext2.

  • If you just want to restore the stick to a working condition without keeping the data:

    Try to delete the persistence image, or just recreate the stick from scratch.

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  • It's crashed like this then had difficulty booting before and recovered, my goal was really to fix and continue using it as is, but beyond that yes to recover files from the stick, and idealy everything so I don't need to set stuff up again. – alan2here Sep 14 '13 at 10:23
  • Thanks again. I've updated the question with more information, mounted automatically files seem ok, casper-rw is too big to view in GEdit. I cannot get fsck.ext2 to analyse it without it giving an impressively alarming error about corrupting things if done on a mounted drive, so I don't get that. What now? – alan2here Sep 14 '13 at 13:56
  • Could it have broken it's permissions denying itself access to write on the drive? – alan2here Sep 14 '13 at 14:00
  • Somone just gave me a hand, I got the files off that I needed but the drive as a whole is dead. – alan2here Sep 14 '13 at 16:28

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