Some systems, like mine (nForce 570 Ultra chipset with SATA hard drives), will drop to busybox when booting up Ubuntu 8.10 in some occasion. The reason is Ubuntu 8.10 do not have enough time to load the essential modules before mounting the root filesystem of a SATA hard drive. This may happen to some systems only.
Method 1 :
To solve this problem, just add “bootdelay=90” at the end of “kernel” tag of /boot/grub/menu.lst
Reboot and the problem gone!
Method 2 :
Wait 1-2 seconds at the busybox screen. Type “exit” and the boot process continue. The Ubuntu 8.10 then booted up.
Filed under: Ubuntu
[...] found an interesting similar problem at http://samiux.wordpress.com/2008/12/16/howto-avoid-to-drop-to-busybox-in-ubuntu-810/, but can’t exactly implement the solution since the /boot/grub/menu.lst file doesn’t [...]