HELP! "Disk Drive not ready yet or not present"

Hi everyone,

So I have a bit of a crisis on my hands. I foolishly started upgrading and doing some maintenance work to my Ubuntu server late at night tonight - thinking I have a pretty standard setup and it will go smoothly.

It didn't.

Right now the biggest problem I have is while booting I get the message "The disk drive for /backups is not ready yet or not present." followed with options to skip mounting the volume or to manually recover. The problem is that since I can't SSH in I'm using Lish, and cannot actually enter a prompt to skip or manually recover. It's just stuck "waiting".

Any ideas on how I can get past this error? The backups drive is a separate disk image I made and mounted. I'm thinking I may need to just start over from scratch, which would be a real bummer. My biggest concern with that is that while my website files are safe (and my clients), the databases are still in the main volume. I also rather foolishly am way behind on backups, and actually may not have any available.

… really kicking myself right now. Any help is much appreciated!