Iwill start by saying I think I know what caused this boot-time error on Linux Mint but should also apply to Debian and Ubuntu.
I changed my BIOS time to several hours in the past to match the current time, but this caused Linux to think there were incorrect filesystem times.
The problem is that it seems when you hit this I am not sure what is happening, it doesn't seem to be doing fsck and hangs without prompting the user.
What I have found is that........