The last thing I did was to install upstart and then try to restart my raspberry Pi. The install looked to be fine and then I posted a shutdown command:
sudo shutdown (I think it was)
I left it a while to turn off and I think it had done so when I disconnected the power to turn it back on again. From there I couldn't SSH into the device again. I was able to ping the Pi from my desktop, and it responded. So... on connecting the Pi to my TV via HDMI I got the following messages:
"transcript of the on-screen messages":
fsck from util-linux 2.20.1
dosfsck 3.0.13, 30 Jun 2012, FAT32, LFN
There are differences between boot sector and its backup.
Differences: (offset:original/backuo)
65:01/00
Not automatically fixing this.
/dev/mmcblk0p5: 14 files, 19558/120958 clusters
FAT-fs (mmcblk0p5): Volume was not properly unmounted. Some data may be corrupt.
Please run fsck.
So.... hopefully I don't need to totally reformat the SDCard and loose everything on there. Are there any suggestions on a solution to this at all?
fsck.vfat -f -r -v -V. I do have a dual boot PC and I sometimes get this issue with a FAT32 partition that sometimes reports this if I have had a crash. (I have a suspicion that THAT particular byte is one that tells Windows if the disk was cleanly unmounted.) Your difficulty is if you only have the Pi to work on - a separate PC (the one you SSH from) with a card reader/writer should enable you to make some progress. – SlySven Dec 15 '15 at 0:00fsckshould handle it from a command line, thought you will need an argument or two to force it to fix things, (use--helpto see what might be needed). Hopefully there will not be any data loss. 8-) – SlySven Dec 15 '15 at 18:04