Re: Journalctl and offline boot disk drive

[Andy Smith <andy@strugglers.net>]

Hi,

On Sun, Mar 30, 2025 at 04:32:55PM +1100, George Kirkham wrote:
> Now with Journalctl, is it still possible to connect the failed-to-boot disk
> drive to another computer and read logs?  How?

You got an answer regarding reading systemd journal in another
directory, but…

For there to be any persistent logs in /var/log then at least the root
filesystem must have been mounted read-write. This is really quite far
into the boot process, so I would think there would be a way to get it
to a rescue prompt even when the rest of the system does not come up.

There should already be a grub entry that boots to "rescue" target, but
in case you need to do it another way you can edit the kernel command
line to have "systemd.unit=rescue.target" on the end. You can also use
"break=" to stop boot at various places in the initramfs.

More info here:

    https://wiki.debian.org/systemd#systemd_hangs_on_startup_or_shutdown

Thanks,
Andy

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