The Geekette Speaketh

The problem with my current laptop is most likely the fan. Recently, when the weather here gets really hot the laptop would just suddenly shutdown. On MS Windows, this "sudden death" happens under 3 minutes. In Ubuntu, it happens in 30 minutes. Still, it doesn't leave me happy.

I decided that if it ever shuts down again on me, I'd continue my writing using my netbook. Eventually, the laptop overheats and I take out the netbook. I then find out that even my netbook had a slight problem.

Apparently it didn't shutdown well the last time.  I must have gotten impatient and too sleepy to care and simply hit the power button long enough to just turn off.  The netbook starts its checks and tries to repair itself up to a certain point when it simply could not continue without human help. I was ready to do a manual fsck command on it when it gives me the following message.

Give root password for maintenance
(or type Control-D for normal startup):

Oh.  Oops.  I have no idea what the default Ubuntu root password is.  You see, I'm not just using Ubuntu.  I was using EasyPeasy (formerly known as Ubuntu Eee).  Nevertheless, I looked around for a password. None. Fortunately, a little ardent searching on the net led me to a solution.

1. When the grub menu appears, edit it instead of letting it continue to boot Linux.
2. Edit the kernel line by adding the following at the end of that line:
   init=/bin/bash
3. Exit and continue to boot.

This allowed me to get into the root prompt and run fsck on the available devices.  Reboot after maintenance and everything is, well, easy peasy!