Re: [tlug] Computer fails to boot

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

David Bernat writes:
 > "Johan Berntsson" <johan@example.com> wrote:
 > 
 > >You probably have to remount the hard disc with read-write
 > >permissions. Try something similar to: sudo mount -o remount,rw
 > >/mnt/hda1

He's just guessing.  Try

    sudo mount -o remount,rw /dev/sda1

instead:

 > /etc/mtab as currently written
 > 
 > /dev/sda1 / ext3 rw,relatime,errors=remount-ro 0 0
        ^^^^        ^^
LOOK! --||||--------||

 > Does errors=remount-ro point to part of the problem?

Almost certainly not.  You do not need to be able to write to a disk
to run a program from a file on that disk, for one thing.  For
another, since (under Knoppix, I guess?) it's mounted rw, you probably
don't have hardware problems that prevent mounting rw under your
HDD-based installation, either.  You won't be able to find that out
until you successfully boot that system, though.

The problem is that somehow /bin/sh -> /bin/dash has been either
trashed or set to non-executable, and the kernel refuses to load and
execute it.  You need to su and reset those permissions on dash:

chmod 0755 /bin/dash

The question is how to su.  Several suggestions were given.  Have you
tried those?  What was the result, including error messages?