Entering emergency mode on boot
Hey team,
Every time I turn my computer on, it will give me the "Emergency mode" screen as shown in the attached picture. I have to press Enter, write
systemctl reboot, then it will take me to the regular fedora Grub menu so I can select the second ostree image which works. Note that I did also rebase to the same exact version as the last functional image but still for some reason when I select anything besides the "old" image it won't work.
Any ideas on what might be the problem, and how to fix?
Thanks
10 Replies
I think that someone mentioned they couldn't boot Bluefin & so previous deployement is temporarily used
but emergency mode isn't mentioned
you can use
journalctl to view system logs
it's likely some faulty update or hardware
it might be something with your harddrive
or /etc/fstab being wrong@xyny any pointers on what to look for in journalctl logs? it s a HUGE file
the output of
journalctl -b -1 --since today -p3 | grep -v "Refusing to set permissions on hardlinked file" > boot_logs_filtered.txti can't really find anything worth emergency mode-ing over in that file, but then again, i'm not an expert, this is very likely not an issue caused by bluebuild
i would scroll journalctl from the bottom up to see if there are any serious-looking error messages and then google them
I would start to look for any systemd mount failures. If your system cannot find or can't mount a partition successfully marked as necessary in fstab, it will refuse to boot.
I believe you can do this in rescue mode with and you will see a list like so:
If any of those have an "x" then something is wrong with your /etc/fstab. In journalctl you can also search (grep) for
Dependency failed for Local File Systems. . If they aren't mounted but are found, try to see why, maybe they are having filesystem or hardware errors. (For which you can use fsck and smartctl if available, though be careful with fsck, as it can make permanent changes to partitions if not used correctly.)
If all the needed filesystems are mounted, I would try to look for systemd units that didn't start and fail to satisfy targets. Search journalctl for things like Dependency failed for and .target: Triggering OnFailure=, or try to use the systemctl --failed command@Aura thank you for the detailed response!
So it is
initrd-switch-root.service that Failed. Please see attached pictures for details.
I do not think this is hardware related, as I am able to boot into the previous ostree without any issues.
Could it be related to a firmware upgrade? Another user with the same device as me reported: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/asus-zenbook-duo-2024-ux8406ma-nixos/39792/101?u=tom1NixOS Discourse
Asus Zenbook Duo (2024 / UX8406MA) & NixOS
I’ve been trying to narrow down the 6.10.5 issue and have found that, at least on my machine, on NixOS, it’s not a kernel issue. I was able to reproduce the same issue on 6.10.3 when I had other recent NixOS updates. So, after bisecting those recent nixpkgs upgrades, I’ve been able to identify that the error I posted above (flip_done timed out...
Hmm well it says it can't find a file in /ostree. Maybe your ostree is corrupted somehow?
I have no idea how this could have happened. The weird thing is that I rebased to the exact same ostree version as the one that worked previously but it only get the Emergency mode reboot when I select the new one.
How would you suggest I proceed? Will probably wait until F41 hoping that the linux kernel 6.11 and new firmware gets fixed for my Asus Zenbook Duo, and then reinstall silverblue from scratch and reinstall my files. I am terrified of playing around more on my device as I need it for work..
yeah, a reinstall will probably fix it
it's hard to know what's at fault here
you should back up your home directory immediately, if not already
you could always go uptream to ublue or fedora and try to determine the cause of the issue, but that might take a while
a reinstall should be pretty quick and painless if you have your files and a list of installed flatpaks etc saved
with custom images obviously making that easier