I dual-boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu 11.10 on my new ASUS K53E laptop, and have been doing so happily for a couple of weeks now. Today I was playing a game in Windows 7, then closed the game and restarted my computer. I should mention that it was plugged into (and exclusively using) an external monitor at the time. Again, I have been doing this without problems for days. When the computer rebooted and the Grub 2 menu came up, I selected my Ubuntu partition and it began loading. Then suddenly,the screen started to flicker between a black screen with the mouse cursor and a black screen with lots of white text, but it flashes too fast for me to read. I have disconnected the external monitor (and indeed everything but the power cord and ethernet line) and attempted to reboot but the same thing happens. When I boot into Ubuntu Recovery Mode and run fsck from the graphic menu, here is the output:
fsck from util-linux 2.19.1
[ 130.370228 Adding 3964924k swap on /dev/sda6. Priority:-1 extensions:1 across:
3964924k
/dev/sda5: Superblock last mount time is in the future.
(by less than a day, probably due to the hardware clock being incorrectly set) FIXED.
/dev/sda5: ***** REBOOT LINUX *****
/dev/sda5: 274504/12124160 files (0.3% non-contiguous), 4230068/48492032 blocks
mountall: fsck / [477] terminated with status 3
mountall: System must be rebooted: /
Finished, please press ENTER
I also tried the remount command to "Remount / read/write and mount all other file systems" as listed in the menu and received the following information:
fsck from util-linux 2.19.1
[ 130.370228 Adding 3964924k swap on /dev/sda6. Priority:-1 extensions:1 across:
3964924k
/dev/sda5: Superblock last mount time is in the future.
(by less than a day, probably due to the hardware clock being incorrectly set) FIXED.
/dev/sda5: clean, 274507/12124160 files, 4230363/48492032 blocks
[ 22.401032 EXT4-fs (sda5): re-mounted. Opts: errors=remount-ro
Finished, please press ENTER
Pressing enter takes me back to the Recovery Menu screen. I have run the dpkg command from here to repair any broken packages but it reports there are none. I used the grub command to update grub bootloader but that didn't do anything either. When I use the resume command to resume normal boot, lots of text flashes on the screen and I am able to catch a brief glimpse of something that reads like this:
Starting load of fallback graphics device [FAIL]
That may not be worded verbatim, but the terms "load" "fallback" "graphics" and "FAIL" are definitely all there. All text is in white except for FAIL which is in red/orange.
It should be noted that I can boot into Windows 7 with no problems, and when booting from an Ubuntu 11.10 Live CD and mounting my Ubuntu partition, I cannot copy any of my files to an external drive because they are owned by "Group 1000."
How do I get my Ubuntu partition working again?
Well, I didn't find any solutions here (or anywhere else for that matter), so I guess I'll just answer my own questions by saying I fixed it by reinstalling Ubuntu from a LiveCD. That worked fine. I think he problem may have been caused by external devices plugged into the machine during reboot (possibly either the monitor or an external network drive that was mounted).