During startup, any administration knows that this is where you need to be aware of the things going on with your system. But out of the box, Ubuntu comes ready to suppress the errors and display a nice splash screen.

To get around this and get your information back you want to run:

sudo joe /boot/grub/menu.lst

and locate the below:

title Ubuntu 8.04.1, kernel 2.6.24-19-generic
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-19-generic root=UUID=ed59a33a-69bf-4a01-af11-be65b87b4286 ro quiet splash xforcevesa
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.24-19-generic
quiet

You just want to remove quiet splash so it reads:

title Ubuntu 8.04.1, kernel 2.6.24-19-generic
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-19-generic root=UUID=ed59a33a-69bf-4a01-af11-be65b87b4286 ro xforcevesa
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.24-19-generic
quiet

Obviously you’ll want to do this for the appropriate kernel title that you are using, as of the date of this posting it was 2.6.24-19.