System starts in emergency mode...how do I recover ?? (as a newbie)

[Tim]

Allegedly, on or about 24 August 2014, Tod Merley sent several major
syntax errors:
>  tail dmesg #prints the last ten lines of dmesg

You mean:

  dmesg|tail

You have to pipe the output of dmesg through the tail command, to do
what you want to do.

>  less dmesg #prints several lines of dmesg with response to up/down
> arrow to see the whole file - q to end

Likewise, you really mean:

  dmesg|less

To pipe the output of the dmesg command through the less command, to
allow paging through it.

>  cat dmesg #prints the whole dmesg file to the screen all at once 

Also, wrong, and another completely unnecessary use of a cat.  Just use
the dmesg command, by itself, and you'll see the whole output dumped to
screen.

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -rsvp
Linux 3.9.10-100.fc17.x86_64 #1 SMP Sun Jul 14 01:31:27 UTC 2013 x86_64

All mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted, there is no point
trying to privately email me, I will only read messages posted to the
public lists.

George Orwell's '1984' was supposed to be a warning against tyranny, not
a set of instructions for supposedly democratic governments.

ZNQR LBH YBBX