So, everything was going nice. Ubuntu MATE was jogging along, behaving; everything was smooth. Until that fateful day I decided to dual boot Kubuntu. Now, don’t get me wrong: I like Kubuntu, though not as much as Ubuntu MATE. But it had some nice features, so I booted, installed, and split the hard drive space between the two. I spent the rest of the day in Kubuntu, then tried to boot into UM next morning. The boot process appeared to go normally, but then I got a command line style login. Normally, I get a flash of this, then the usual graphical login. Weird. I typed in my username and password, and was greeted with a command line. Nothing bad about a command line, but I would have liked a GUI. I had heard of typing startx before, so I typed it in. Nothing seemed to be happening, so I hit Ctrl+C (just as some text came up–instantly began regretting choice) and typed reboot. I tried booting into UM again, and this time I got a weird bash shell with an error message:
Failure: File system check of the root filesystem failed The root filesystem on /dev/sda1 requires a manual fsck
Does anyone know what this means (in a little more detail than the error message) and how to fix it? I have tried booting in recovery mode and I get the same result. I am now in the process of manually copying my important files into my Kubuntu partition 
.
Thanks,
Joel
Perhaps these pages from Askubuntu will help -
Good luck @Leoj03
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Thank you, @mdooley, I will try this.
It worked! Thanks, @mdooley!