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George Udosen
Asked: 2017-02-10 12:03:05 +0800 CST

Ubuntu xenial server on virtualbox recovery mode times out and freezes

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I have this strange behaviour where if I access the Grub2 recovery mode and select the the recovery menu option Drop to root shell prompt and mount the file system with:

mount -o remount,rw /

After moving between folder with cd command, if I stop entering commands at the prompt for a few seconds it begins to load or starting certain services on its own without me actually exiting the prompt and resuming normal boot. I see the error:

failed to start lsb

It then return to the recovery menu and freezes with my inability to re-select any option from the recovery menu using my keyboard, after that it shows the error:

sulogin: input overrun at /dev/tty1

From here on I can only shutdown the guest OS from virtualbox. 

NAME      TYPE      SIZE USED PRIO
/dev/dm-1 partition 4.7G   0B   -1
george@george-ubuntu-server:~$ df -h
Filesystem                                   Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev                                         2.3G     0  2.3G   0% /dev
tmpfs                                        469M  7.5M  462M   2% /run
/dev/mapper/george--ubuntu--server--vg-root   36G   10G   24G  30% /
tmpfs                                        2.3G  216K  2.3G   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs                                        5.0M  4.0K  5.0M   1% /run/lock
tmpfs                                        2.3G     0  2.3G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/sda1                                    472M  165M  284M  37% /boot
cgmfs                                        100K     0  100K   0% /run/cgmanager/fs
leap                                         909G  568G  342G  63% /media/sf_leap
tmpfs                                        469M   44K  469M   1% /run/user/1000

george@george-ubuntu-server:~$ sudo blkid

/dev/sda1: UUID="1a047c26-dce8-4e9f-bb18-d06f03135c7a" TYPE="ext2" PARTUUID="7576c720-01"
/dev/sda5: UUID="4hGUQE-38qc-M27B-5u0Z-cWST-4E1l-jfOEYF" TYPE="LVM2_member" PARTUUID="7576c720-05"
/dev/mapper/george--ubuntu--server--vg-root: UUID="d9741b12-2158-4d81-8fbb-8256b31b99ea" TYPE="ext4"
/dev/mapper/george--ubuntu--server--vg-swap_1: UUID="6a97a99c-78df-4a30-aec9-815e9b62dcc9" TYPE="swap"

george@george-ubuntu-server:~$ cat /etc/fstab

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
/dev/mapper/george--ubuntu--server--vg-root /               ext4    errors=remount-ro 0       1
# /boot was on /dev/sda1 during installation
UUID=1a047c26-dce8-4e9f-bb18-d06f03135c7a /boot           ext2    defaults        0       2
/dev/mapper/george--ubuntu--server--vg-swap_1 none            swap    sw              0       0

dpkg -l *lsb* | grep ii

ii  lsb-base       9.20160110ubuntu0.2 all          Linux Standard Base init script functionality
ii  lsb-release    9.20160110ubuntu0.2 all          Linux Standard Base version reporting utility

grep -i lsb /var/log/syslog*

Results link: http://pastebin.com/07brqwXC

george@george-HP-Pavilion-17-Notebook-PC:~$ lsb_release -a

No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description:    Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS
Release:    16.04
Codename:   xenial

Virtualbox version:

VirtualBox Graphical User Interface
Version 5.1.14 r112924 (Qt5.5.1)

Update:

tail -f /var/log/syslog

enter image description here

Note: can't copy text

boot

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Sometimes I work too long and get stupid. My apologies for the delay.

    input overrun at /dev/tty1 indicates keyboard input exceeding the buffer. This can have a number of root causes.

    1) A habit of eating over the keyboard in result in crumbs getting lodged between/under keys resulting in a "permanently closed" switch flooding the keyboard buffer with input. (This you can sometimes solve by turning the keyboard upside down and banging on the underside until the crumbs fall out.

    2) A faulty keyboard can have this same result. This can be resolved by replacing the keyboard (also fixes problem 1 with less mess)

    3) If it's a USB keyboard, This can also be caused by a bad port. You can resolve that by choosing a different port

    Of course this assumes that you know of all the input devices connected to your system. If not you can get some clues by examining the output of ls /dev/input/by-path

    For those who are interested there's a great article regarding TTY here. I found the section on Signal Madness quite amusing

    Sources:

    http://zeldor.biz/2011/02/tty1-input-overrun/

    Experience

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