Comment 35 for bug 523484

I am running 11.04 64-bit and also have /var as a separate partition. Not only ureadahead(-other) but others such as dbus, gdm and dpkg cannot create files under /var/lib since the required directories are non-existent. The last thing I remember doing before boot failure was software upgrade this past week. Something seems to be blocking /var from use, creating a bottleneck giving errors that fsck cannot repair, namely:

init: ureadahead-other main process (...) terminated with status 4
init: ureadahead main process (...) terminated with status 5
init: dbus pre-start process (...) terminated with status 1

I can mount and chroot into my filesystem using live cd (which I'm doing now) to perform operations. The problem doesn't appear to be a broken grub2 one, as those repair operations as instructed run without complication, and fstab UUIDs checks out to be consistent. This situation looks like resort to yet another clean install situation for me, one too many, IMO.