Comment 4 for bug 97206

Just encountered a variant of this in Hardy this morning. I had a single FAT 16 partition USB flash drive connected to my computer. For some reason at boot up fsck was seeing it as /dev/sdb; normally my first hard drive is mounted at /dev/sda , my second hard drive is /dev/sdb , and since Hardy install the USB flash is /dev/sdc. Fsck wanted to check the file system on my second hard drive, however, due the mount order issue it tried to fsck the USB flash drive. That caused this error:

The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2
filesystem. If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2
filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock
is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock:
    e2fsck -b 8193 <device>

fsck died with exit status 8

I rebooted and the same problem happened. I turned off my computer, removed the USB drive, and rebooted fsck ran normally and checked my second hard disk and my computer booted normally. Unlike the OP I could not simply type exit and have the drives mounted in the correct locations. If I did that, on log in I got an error about how my home directory was unable to be found.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Sunday Apr 27 2008
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 8.04
Uname -r: 2.6.24-16-386