Mongodb failing on Debian

Question

I'm building a MongoDB VM and just cannot get it too work. The output is as follows:

After this operation, 0 B of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y
[master 462b01d] saving uncommitted changes in /etc prior to apt run
 Author: root <root@mongo>
 1 files changed, 5 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-)
Setting up mongodb-10gen (2.4.5) ...
Starting database: mongodb failed!
invoke-rc.d: initscript mongodb, action "start" failed.
dpkg: error processing mongodb-10gen (--configure):
 subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1
configured to not write apport reports
                                      Errors were encountered while processing:
 mongodb-10gen
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
root@mongo:~#

I've been following the official install instructions from the mongodb website. I found this patch fix but this doesn't fix the error either, just throws a new one. I've also seen removing a bad package from dpkg/status can fix the error but I wouldn't even know where to start.

EDIT 1

I followed the steps in the top voted answer here and now I can access the mongo shell, but when I service mongodb start it still says failed. I wasn't able to access the shell before so that's something, yeah?

root@mongo:~# service mongodb start
Starting database: mongodb failed!
root@mongo:~# mongo
MongoDB shell version: 2.4.5
connecting to: test
Welcome to the MongoDB shell.
For interactive help, type "help".
For more comprehensive documentation, see
        http://docs.mongodb.org/
Questions? Try the support group
        http://groups.google.com/group/mongodb-user
> ^C
bye
root@mongo:~#

Answer 1

If you don't find any traces in the logs:

tail -f -n50 /var/log/mongodb/mongodb.log

you should try to start the server in foreground:

sudo -u mongodb mongod --dbpath /var/lib/mongodb/

and see what's happening. For instance, I had a locale problem.