BlueBuild•3w ago

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

fiftydinar•3w ago

I think that someone mentioned they couldn't boot Bluefin & so previous deployement is temporarily used but emergency mode isn't mentioned

xyny•3w ago

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

tom•3w ago

@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.txt

tom•3w ago

boot_logs_filtered.t...

xyny•3w ago

i 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

Aura•3w ago

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

systemctl list-dependencies local-fs.target

systemctl list-dependencies local-fs.target

and you will see a list like so:

local-fs.target
● ├─-.mount
● ├─boot-efi.mount
● ├─boot.mount
● ├─ostree-remount.service
● ├─systemd-remount-fs.service
● ├─tmp.mount
● ├─var-home.mount
● └─var.mount

local-fs.target
● ├─-.mount
● ├─boot-efi.mount
● ├─boot.mount
● ├─ostree-remount.service
● ├─systemd-remount-fs.service
● ├─tmp.mount
● ├─var-home.mount
● └─var.mount

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

tom•2w ago

@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=tom1

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Aura•2w ago

Hmm well it says it can't find a file in /ostree. Maybe your ostree is corrupted somehow?

tom•2w ago

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..

xyny•2w ago

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

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Entering emergency mode on boot