Re: Re: Boots into emergency mode. How to analyze?

[Matthijs Wensveen <matthijs.wensveen@gmail.com>]

Hi,

First of all, thanks for all the helpful replies!! I've setup a root 
password by using chroot on a livecd and I'm now able to use that pw in 
emergency mode, like The Wanderer suggested. I didn't have a root 
password because my user account has generous sudo permissions. Never 
needed one before, but I'm not sure how this specific problem should be 
handled in my case.
Anyway, meanwhile in emergency mode, I can run journalctl -xb to see the 
boot journal. I found a line saying I should fsck /dev/sdc5 manually, 
which is where my /home partition lives, so I'm guessing that's the 
problem. I'll try that first.

Best regards,
Matthijs

On 26-6-2015 5:39, Dave Thayer wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 25, 2015 at 01:54:56PM +0200, Matthijs Wensveen wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I'm running unstable / sid. Yesterday, I suddenly started booting into
> > emergency mode and I'm unsure why. I had a hang the day before, right after
> > a apt-get dist-upgrade, so it might be either one of those, or something
> > else altogether.
> I had a similar problem after a recent sid upgrade. Normal booting
> lead to emergency mode.
>
> I was able to get to a GUI by going into the "Advanced options for
> Debian GNU/Linux" grub sub-menu and selecting the sysvinit version of
> the kernel instead of the systemd default. I did have some very long
> pauses in the init sequence, but I finally got to a graphic login.
>
> It turns out the cause of the emergency mode was some cruft I had in
> my fstab file, specifically a line containing "none /proc/bus/usb
> usbfs devmode=0666 0 0". Commenting this out cured the emergency mode
> problem. I'm not sure why this was in there in the first place, but a
> google search suggests it was some sort of kludge to get an ancient
> version of virtualbox to behave.
>
> hth
>
> dt