Hello,

When I started up my laptop this morning (Ubuntu) I received the following message on a black and white screen:

Gave up waiting for root device. Common problems:
-boot args (cat/proc/cmdline)
- Check rootdelay = (did the system wait long enough?)
- Check root = (did the system wait for the right device?)
-missing modules (cat/proc/modules; ls/dev)
ALERT! /dev/disk/by-uuid/a9571bdb-5179-4ce8-9043-c0a160e724f0 does not exist. Dr(next line, edge of screen)opping to a shell!

BusyBox v1.13.3 (Ubuntu 1:1.13.3-1ubuntu11) built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

(initramfs) <blinking underscore>



? Please help. I switched to linux a year ago because my laptop wasn't doing well on Vista and my friend told me I didn't need to be a programmer like he is. So I'm not a programmer, I don't know how to do anything that involves a command line, but I am very good at following directions and am very computer savvy with software, just not the behind the scenes stuff.

Thanks for your time. Please be specific with how to do your suggestions; I won't automatically know. (-:

My first guess is the root partition is corrupted.
I would try booting from a live CD and run the fsck command. Once the live CD is boot start a terminal window and run the command
sudo fdisk -l (a small L)

This will display the number of partitions. Typically three are created /boot, / (root) and swap. It is difficult to say exactly how it is partitioned. Your root is probably either sda1 or sda2.

sudo fsck /dev/sda2

.... I don't know what a live CD is buy my disk drive doesn't work. :-/ Can this be done from a USB?

A live CD is where the OS runs strictly from memory and accesses the CD for apps instead of the hard drive. You should also be able to boot from your installation disk too.
There are distributions that boot from USB.

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/