Comment 29 for bug 428318

Please consider fixing this in 9.10. I upgraded from 9.04 to 9.10 in preparation for the release of 10.04. I had no problem booting for several months. Then, all of a sudden, after updating and rebooting, I couldn't boot. Based on the error message, I created the symbolic link for my Ubuntu 9.10 partition in /dev/disk/by-uuid, rebooted and was able to use the system for another period of time. This time, I couldn't create the symbolic link and then boot (not sure why it worked the first time and after). I believe this partition was created (with gparted) as FAT32 and then changed to ext3 via gparted.

The tools in the util-linux-ng package seem inconsistent. When I boot with a Ubuntu LiveCD (9.10 32-bit Desktop), I get the following:

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo fsck -t ext3 /dev/sda8
fsck from util-linux-ng 2.16
e2fsck 1.41.9 (22-Aug-2009)
/dev/sda8: clean, 314232/3141600 files, 6959167/12611017 blocks (check after next mount)

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo blkid -p /dev/sda8
/dev/sda8: ambivalent result (probably more filesystems on the device)

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo sfdisk -l
....
/dev/sda8 50173+ 56452 6280- 50444068+ 83 Linux
....

If people think it's sufficient to let users just fix this themselves, then they are relegating Ubuntu Linux to the role of an O/S for developers and maybe server farm operators, but not as a desktop for home users or small businesses. To be usable by non-technical people, the partitioning tools need to convert partitions/create partitions that are acceptable to the other tools in the distribution. Replacement tools need to work with the limitations of the rest of the distribution (or there needs to be a reasonable non-technical way to fix the problem).