Can't boot notebook at all anymore

[MR ZenWiz]

On Sun, Jun 25, 2017 at 3:12 AM, Ralf Mardorf <silver.bullet at zoho.com> wrote:
>
> since booting an Ubuntu live media and running
>
> $ sudo -i
>
> # apt update
>
> # apt full-upgrade
>
> # apt install smartmontools
>
> # for drive in $(smartctl --scan|cut -d- -f1); do smartctl -HA $drive; done
>
> isn't time-robbing, it doesn't harm to do this before doing anything else.
>

I tried this - everything reported normal within tolerances, no failures.

I switched out the big HGST 1TB drive and moved the Seagate .5TB boot
drive back to slot 1 (/dev/sdb).  No help.  I took out the 16G RAM and
put back th 8G - no help.

I tried to reinstall Xubuntu 1 more time - still came up in busybox.
I saved the dmesg into a file, but more doesn't work right, so all I
could see was the end of the file.  Grep showed no "error" patterns.

I was going to give up completely and sell it for parts, but then
today I figured what the heck and installed Mint Serena (18.1) with
xfce4 and without encrypting my home directory.  It is running just
fine.

I put back the HGST, which has my encrypted home directory on it, this
time as /dev/sda but the non-boot drive, and it is still running.  I
am writing this from there.  All my files are here and they seem to be
working.  Even my keyboard shortvuts al work (except the ones I had to
modify for Mint's slight differences).

So I have absolutely no idea what was going on with the notebook.
Maybe it was the solar activity I heard about.

I'm glad it's running, but I have little confidence it won't fail me again.

Thanks for all the advice.