Comment 6 for bug 97206

I am also seeing this problem quite often when I boot into Hardy, with the possibly relevant difference that this is an onboard HDD giving me trouble - no USB involved.

If I get this bug once I can expect it several times in the following reboot attempts. At some point it stops happening and then I can expect it to continue booting fine for a while. I have not yet found any pattern.

The log at /var/log/fsck/checkfs reads exactly like the one starting this bug report, but refers of course to my own drive with: "fsck.ext3: No such file or directory while trying to open /dev/sdb6"

When started like this 'print' in Ubuntu doesn't even see sdb, my storage SATA 300GB HDD. None of the 5 partitions are mounted even though only sdb6 actually fails. Why doesn't it try to mount the others?

## Output from running 'parted' as root:
root@duncan-desktop:~# parted
GNU Parted 1.7.1
Using /dev/sda
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.
(parted) print all

Disk /dev/sda: 41,1GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos

Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
 1 32,3kB 39,4GB 39,4GB primary ext3 boot
 2 39,4GB 41,1GB 1736MB extended
 5 39,4GB 41,1GB 1736MB logical linux-swap
## End of output. I will add the correct output from 'parted' next time it starts correctly.

Running e2fsck with the 'Use alternate block' flag (-b) makes no difference to the results:

## cli output of 'e2fsck -b 8193 /dev/sdb' (same result for '/dev/sdb6', and '/dev/sda' reports device busy, so e2fsck seems to be working.)
root@duncan-desktop:~# e2fsck -b 8193 /dev/sdb
e2fsck 1.40.8 (13-Mar-2008)
e2fsck: No such file or directory while trying to open /dev/sdb
[...]
## End of output

Any ideas out there? This makes my system pretty much unusable.

PS: in case it turns out to be relevant here are some specs:
* Processor is Intel Celeron CPU 2.4GHz
* Ubuntu 8.04 is installed on Primary HDD which is a 40GB ATA drive
* /dev/sdb is a 300GB SATA drive, and I've had a lot of trouble trying different configurations to make my MB see both drives an work, so it's possible this is actually a problem with a BIOS setting.

PPS: in the recovery shell I usually run 'shutdown -h now' but it always just continues to boot. I really don't understand this! Why doesn't it shut down?