Hey,
So I have a dual-boot with Windows, because sometimes I need to use windows only programs that do not work with wine or proton and I was in Windows about to shut down when it showed me I could either reboot and update or just update. I did reboot and update (what could go wrong…). Now I am stuck at the situation that I get into grub normally, can select windows boot manager and I bboot into Windows fine, but if I wanted to go to fedora I am greeted with
You are in emergency mode. After logging in...
Cannot open access to console, the root account is locked.
Press enter to continue
<Pressed enter>
Reloading system manager configuration.
Starting default.target
You are in emergency mode...
As you can see after I press enter the shown messages just repeat the same thing over and over. Does anyone know how I could fix it?
Thanks in advance
I just solved the issue. I was trying to solve the issue that my second internal hard drive was not being recognized in windows and the settings app there crashed. (No idea what happened)
By chrooting into the linux partition and looking at the /etc/fstab file I found that my hard drive did not have a UUID anymore. I just commented out that lie and boot works again.
No Idea of what happened to the secnd hard drive since now in linux it shows it as Unallocated space (no partition)
Just as a guess, I would think that the windows upgrade saw the second hard drive, knew it was not a windows drive, and erased the partition table on it so windows could see it as a new drive for use in windows.
Potentially it failed suddenly. That is quite possible.
Also potentially it may have a data cable issue which prevents proper identification and access.
Something similar just occurred here with a Win 11 update. A backup drive I forgot to disconnect now has just a Windows recovery partition and the rest is free space:
% doas fdisk -l /dev/sdb
Disk /dev/sdb: 5.46 TiB, 6001174511616 bytes, 11721043968 sectors
Disk model: My Book 25EE
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0xd00f5438
Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sdb1 * 2048 67110911 67108864 32G c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
This matches a previous as Windows recovery USB drive, but the newer recovery partition exceeds the capacity of my old USB recovery drive:
% doas fdisk -l /dev/sdc
Disk /dev/sdc: 28.86 GiB, 30984437760 bytes, 60516480 sectors
Disk model: STORE N GO
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x8a65b372
Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sdc1 * 2048 60516351 60514304 28.9G c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
I had previously deleted the recovery partition on the Windows boot drive.
During the updates I was asked to create a recovery USB drive, and plugged in the old recovery drive. The activity light was flashing for many minutes before Windows reported success in creating the recovery drive, so I assumed Windows was using it. As @computersavvy suggests, I suspect Windows hijacked my backup drive when the USB drive proved too small.
After a good part of two days updating Windows 11 and 3rd party Windows software, I get to give testdisk a try, and if that fails, recreate the backup drive from 4 smaller drives and 3 systems.