I am running an HP pavilion dv6000 dual boot win7 and Ubuntu 12.04. (well, up until today). after a reboot, the boot process drops to the busy box shell and i end up at the prompt:

BusyBox v1.18.5 (Ubuntu 1:1.18.5-1ubuntu4) built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.
(initramfs)

Ive been researching others who have had this same problem, but haven't been able to find any of those solutions to work for me.

I tried the method described here:

http://www.proposedsolution.com/solutions/ubuntu-booting-to-initramfs-prompt/

and after the final command mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /root -o force it does nothing and gives me another (initramfs) prompt.

I can boot to a live CD (USB) and get to a terminal, but it doesn't seem to do much good, as I can see the /dev/sda1 in the ls command, but it doesn't recognize it when I try to cd to it.

My command line skills are very green, and am just starting to grasp them.

One more question: using the command fdisk -l how can I tell which mount point (sda1/sda2) is my windows partition and which one is Ubuntu?

Any help? I'm in a bit over my head right now...