I'm a linux newbie and the only reason I have it installed is so I can stop having Windows incompatibility issues with Ruby on Rails. Having said that, it sure has been nice, and much faster, and I don't think I'll be doing any Winrails stuff anytime soon.

So I created a virtualmachine using virtualbox and have had ubuntu on it for the last 3 weeks. Recently ubuntu asked if it could update a few things, I clicked 'ok'.

Now it won't boot and I get this error: *mount: mounting /dev on /root/dev failed: No such file or directory mount: mounting /sys on /root/sys failed: No such file or directory ... Target filesystem doesn't have /sbin/init. No init found. Try passing init= bootarg

BusyBox v1.13.3...

(initramfs) _ *

So I cruised the forums and there are a variety of solutions, but they all have to do with booting from the live cd. (which I assume is the ISO image I used to install ubuntu in the first place). But when I boot from that CD, it just hangs on the ubuntu screen, and the little dots keep cycling white to red, but it hung there for an hour so I think it was stuck. Not sure what I can do; can I do anything from the busybox shell (or whatever that is) to fix things?

The thing is, it took about 10 hours to get everything the way I needed with all the gems and whatnot. And I didn't really write down what I tweaked, and I'm middle aged, so all that information has leaked out by now and I don't want to do it again. I'd really like to repair my existing install.

One question you might have is, is there something wrong with the ISO? I don't think so, because I made a new virtual machine and used that same iso file to install a fresh ubuntu.

Any help much appreciated.

Phil