I have a latop with Linux Mint 18.3 installed and today on boot it gave me this message.
BusyBox v1.22.1 (Ubuntu 1:1.22.0-15ubuntu1) built-in shell (ash)
Enter ‘help’ for a list of built-in commands.
(initramfs)
Which I fixed with these commands.
exit then fsck /dev/sda1 -y and then reboot.
After restart I got a different error.
Could not start the X server (your graphical environment)
due to some internal error. Please contact your system administrator
or check your syslog to diagnose. In the meantime this
display will be disabled. Pease restart MDM when the
problem is corrected.
I have tried fixing that with this.
sudo cp /home/your_username/xorg.conf.new /etc/X11/xorg.conf
but it doesn’t work. it tells me that my username directory does not exist even when i can clearly see it there. I am stuck here at the moment.
It’s not the destination that is missing is it? Might happen if your /etc was on a separate partition. Doubtful but thought I’d ask. If you’ve already verified home is safe and the files are readable then that is the only thing that comes to mind.
Have you checked your logs to see if you can find any additional clues?
There is only 1 partition. And how do i check the logs?
/var/log/
you can -
cat [name_of_log] | grep -i [search_term]
i.e. cat /var/log/syslog | grep -i error
or
less [name_of_log]
if you prefer to read through the thing in a scrollable buffer. You can type ‘/’ and then a term to search for. ‘n’ will find the next occurrence.
Keep in mind some of these logs are rotated and have several numbered versions so you’ll only be worried about the most recent non-numbered file. As to what to look for I’m no expert, but I usually look for errors and warnings. All that said in your case the most recent errors are the only ones to concern yourself with. It’s not abnormal to have errors from various daemons sprinkled here and there. I’d check your Xorg.0.log.
I took the laptop to work and one of my colleagues managed to get a cursor working. Later at home I turned it on one more time and the GUI came back but it took like 15 min. So I ended up re-installing with Mint 19.2.