I recently upgraded an ancient Linode virtual server from Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10. When I attempted a reboot it would fail – which wasn’t totally unexpected:
mount: mount point /dev/pts does not exist mountall: mount /dev/pts [1070] terminated with status 32 mountall: Filesystem could not be mounted: /dev/pts mount: mount point /dev/pts does not exist mountall: mount /dev/pts [1074] terminated with status 32 mountall: Filesystem could not be mounted: /dev/pts init: mountall main process (1065) terminated with status 4 Mount of root filesystem failed.
Fortunately Linode has a good set of rescue documentation. After messing around with various suggestions on how to fix this problem I ended up with the following /etc/fstab:
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0 /dev/sda / ext3 noatime,errors=remount-ro 0 1 /dev/sdb none swap sw 0 0 devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0 tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
This, however, did not seem to help. After an hour of random trial and error I finally decided to toggle the following option on the Linode configuration edit page to “no”:
For reasons that are still unclear to me, this mounted /dev/pts properly and the rest of the boot sequence ran without a hitch.