Beginner - My PC won't start

Ask Fedora
, , ,
1

Intel i7-6700K - NVidia GTX 1070 - 16 GB RAM

Hello, I installed Linux / Fedora 43 KDE for the first time a week ago. I already had the opportunity to reinstall the system 5 days ago.

This morning, when I booted my PC, I couldn’t start.

I see a screen: GRUB

Linux (6.17.12-300.fc..
Linux (6.17.1-300.fc..
Linux (0-rescue-...

These two lines take me to an emergency mode page, and I don’t know how to proceed.

I’m currently booting from the Live USB.

Based on other posts, it’s possible this is due to an update, but I don’t know how to fix it.

Here’s my lsblk -f. The last step I took yesterday was to format sdb1 as ext4, and I hadn’t finished mounting it properly.

$ lsblk -f
NAME        FSTYPE  FSVER            LABEL              UUID                                 FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINTS
loop0       erofs                                       c49c3ecb-832b-440f-89b5-a601286ebff0       0   100% /run/rootfsbase
sda                                                                                                         
└─sda1      ext4    1.0              BarraCuda_2To      4a2dce3c-1a82-4554-a35b-90f1846d65ac                
sdb                                                                                                         
└─sdb1      ext4    1.0                                 7d74d34b-0a70-4fa2-8aba-ce3d335598ab                
sdc                                                                                                         
└─sdc1      ext4    1.0              Hitachi_2To        06d8e020-62c0-4c7f-a58d-eb42a65a39a2                
sdd                                                                                                         
└─sdd1      ext4    1.0              SSD_Intel_120      f65ff707-f0e1-4cfb-9581-0ffe93ccaba1                
sde                                                                                                         
└─sde1      ext4    1.0              SSD_SanDisk_Ultr   2391fd26-0776-4801-aa06-774e6964b799                
sdf         iso9660 Joliet Extension Fedora-KDE-Live-43 2025-10-23-04-17-29-00                              
├─sdf1      iso9660 Joliet Extension Fedora-KDE-Live-43 2025-10-23-04-17-29-00                     0   100% /run/initramfs/live
└─sdf2      vfat    FAT16            BOOT               BA0E-CF8F                                           
zram0       swap    1                zram0              686ab48e-16c3-4ae9-9b61-6ce5a1a11c37                [SWAP]
nvme0n1                                                                                                     
├─nvme0n1p1                                                                                                 
├─nvme0n1p2 ext4    1.0                                 fca8b6fa-36e9-4661-8d14-47cd78864180                
└─nvme0n1p3 btrfs                    fedora             ae5e54bc-d6e0-48ab-9a19-63792bae25de

But what worries me most is seeing the nvme0n1p1 partition completely empty.

Can you help a noob like me step by step please?

2

Can you execute blkid /dev/nvme0n1p1 and post the result here?
It is pretty strange seeing it being completely empty, but if that partition was damaged I’d expect you not even being able to see:

Linux (6.17.12-300.fc..
Linux (6.17.1-300.fc..
Linux (0-rescue-...
3

Thank you.

liveuser@localhost-live:~$ blkid /dev/nvme0n1p1
liveuser@localhost-live:~$ sudo blkid /dev/nvme0n1p1
/dev/nvme0n1p1: PARTUUID="9f9a60f6-15c0-4f50-897a-865bb9728cdf"
4

If you just did the install, you should be able to boot one of the Fedora partitions using the Bios boot manager of your PC. If you are booting via GRUB2 and your ESP partition is somehow damaged then you should be able to rescue an installed system with the installer, but I don’t know if the Live Image will do that. I would use Fedora Media Writer to create a full install USB with and boot that, then select repair previously installed Fedora System. That should be the quickest path to joy. If the live image has the option, you should be able to pick it from the installation menu, if not get the full/everything install image using fedora media writer. You should be able to install it from a booted live image, it just won’t be there next boot of the live image (Media Writer won’t be there that is).

5

It seems the ESP partition is damaged and cannot be recognized. Please follow @jakfrost 's instruction to create an installation medium (USB device) and rescue your installation.

Note than you need a separate USB device for that. LiveUSB system still lives on the USB device the live system is installed on, and cannot be modified by Fedora media writer on live system. Ping me if you have only this spare usb pendrive or you don’t have any more usb port.

6

I’m not sure it is, after all the check done by @ravaged showed the UUID of the partition.The user should be able to boot whatever entry from what the BIOS sees to get into a running system if it is just the boot loader issue in the ESP partition. Though from a new user POV, trying the installer recovery option is pretty much a one step process. I guess it depends how much effort to recover you want to expend getting to the working system. Frankly, if I have only just installed and have no personal data stored there yet, I would just do another install.

7

That returned UUID is a PARTUUID which is the partition’s ID in GUID Partition Table (so at least the partition table is not damaged, what a relief). blkid should also have recognized the fat/vfat filesystem on it if the filesystem of ESP is not serverely damaged.

This is what it looks like on my computer:

/dev/nvme0n1p1: UUID="8619-6974" BLOCK_SIZE="512" TYPE="vfat" PARTLABEL="EFI System Partition" PARTUUID="e23532a9-c942-45de-acc7-407cdb272c76"

UUID is stored in the filesystem metadata section.

8

Thank you for your help. I will reinstall. It’s not too serious, but the issue is that this is the second time in a few days, and I still don’t understand what happened.

1 Like
9

If I have done the installation correctly, with Fedora running from the USB drive, try to mount the partition and first execute sudo fdisk -l, what will be the result?

10

The issue is now very clear:
In my motherboard’s UEFI settings, for Secure Boot, I recently changed the boot mode from “Windows UEFI Mode” to “Other OS”—I no longer remember which tutorial I was following.

PXL_20251227_210926842~2
PXL_20251227_210926842~21920×1133 257 KB

PXL_20251227_205821274
PXL_20251227_2058212741920×2560 802 KB

11

It’s worth knowing, we often forget to change the settings in Bios