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Ubuntu 20.04 boots to BusyBox, fsck not found (Persistent USB)

cz flag

I did a persistent install of Ubuntu 20.04 on my USB, and until now it had been working fine. However, last night my laptop died and the shutdown process failed, so I just force shut it down and unplugged the USB. The next morning, I attempt to boot up Ubuntu and am greeted with initramfs booting up instead.

I've done some reading on the common solutions, but here is where things are a little weird for me:

  • The file checks finish with no errors.
  • When I attempt to run fsck (or several other commands, like sudo and su), it says sh: fsck: not found.
  • When I run exit, I get a kernel panic.

Also, when I run Linux Internals Reader on Windows with the flash drive plugged in, and I open upper/home/chennis* in casper-rw, almost all the files I had are gone. I can only see .cache, .config, .gnupg, .mozilla, .bash_history. So if there's any way to recover my user files, that would be much appreciated.

Logs

I am unable to post directly embed images or copy paste directly from the terminal; my apologies in advance for that.

After filechecks

Link to logs after filecheck

Exit

Link to exit logs

guiverc avatar
cn flag
What do you mean by forced shutdown? Something safe like a SysRq command to sync buffers & shutdown? It doesn't sound like it and it should be your choice next time for sure.
cz flag
By force shutdown, I mean I just pressed the power off button - in the future I will not do that. (The terminal was frozen so I could not do anything there.)
guiverc avatar
cn flag
By grabbing your phone & searching "*magic sysrq*" or equivalent you'll find the keys that will allow you to directly command the Linux kernel; allowing safe shutdown, killing X, etc. The wikipedia article is as good as any and is nearly always at or near the top of search results (it works on any linux device with a keyboard attached; ie. no good for android phones or anywhere where the keyboard is drawn on the screen as that requires a working GUI to use; a real keyboard as it's Linux commands, not Ubuntu). Kernels can be compiled to ignore the keys but that's rare.
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