Fix Ubuntu 9.10 upgrade mountall errors
November 12th, 2009 | by TK |Apparently I wasn’t the only user affected by the recent Ubuntu 9.10 upgrade ‘mishap’. Some of us have experienced unbootable machines after upgrading through the system’s Update Manager, receiving errors like: ‘init: mountall main process (random number) terminated with status 1‘. First off, make sure your menu.lst (/boot/grub/menu.lst) is edited to point to the new kernel version (2.6.31-14-generic).
Make sure to backup your Menu.lst, just in case…
# sudo cp /boot/grub/menu.lst /boot/grub/menu.lst2
Okay, now edit your menu.lst to point to the correct kernel as shown below…
# sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst
On a side note, while attempting to edit my Menu.lst, I edited incorrectly and was greeted with the error message; Error 15: File Not Found - This was because I had an extra character (typo) in the path to the kernel, hence the File Not Found. Make sure it’s not something stupid like that 
However, if you’re still stumped try looking here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1321149
** Edit Menu.lst at your own risk **
