One of my instances is having trouble with a disk. The serial console teasingly displays the erro and a console prompt:
fsck.ext4: No such file or directory while trying to open /dev/sdbt
Possibly non-existent device?
fsck died with exit status 8
[?25l[?1c7[1G[[31mFAIL[39;49m8[?25h[?0c[31mfailed (code 8).[39;49m
[....] File system check failed. A log is being saved in /var/log/fsck/checkfs if that location is writable. Please repair the file system manually. ...[?25l[?1c7[1G[[31mFAIL[39;49m8[?25h[?0c [31mfailed![39;49m
[....] A maintenance shell will now be started. CONTROL-D will terminate this shell and resume system boot. ...[?25l[?1c7[1G[[33mwarn[39;49m8[?25h[?0c [33m(warning).[39;49m
sulogin: root account is locked, starting shell
root@(none):~#
Is there any way to make the serial console interactive? It'd be great to look at the fstab file for starters, or even hit ctl-D to kick it along.
Also can anything be done to cleanup the gibberish on the console?
First, you can shutdown the instance but not delete its boot disk. Then you can create a new instance; click on "Show advanced options" during the instance creation, and you will be presented the option to add "ADDITIONAL DISKS (Optional)."
Attach the disk that needs a fsck as an additional disk. This way the new instance will be booting off of a clean disk, and you can fsck the other disk as normal. Assuming everything can be cleaned up, you can go back to using the original disk as a boot disk again.
The gibberish is just the ANSI escape sequences used to color the output on a terminal.