Fedora froze a couple times in a row. Maybe because of the bugged out ungoogled chromium software I installed via the software store. I did a couple hard shutdowns and now I’m stuck in emergency mode. I tried fixing it myself for a while, but I just don’t understand anything and I don’t want to break it worse than it’s already broken. I don’t know how to send a picture from the dracut shell to online but I really need to fix this. I don’t have any super important files on the root system so I’ve been booting from a live os every single day. It’s wasting a ton of time for me and I can’t use all the features I want in a computer because of it. I use this computer for work, so I really need to fix this. I’m really thankful for any help, suggestions, or ideas.
Hint – the t in Btrfs stands for “tree”. You’ll likely need to run some sort of filesystem repair. It is not unheard of that a hard power-off can cause that sort of filesystem problem.
Also, if you tag your post with btrfs you might get the attention of someone who has expertise in that area.
I’m not sure. I’m a noob. All I know is that when I was troubleshooting I was able to see dev/sda or sdb 1-3. So maybe that means I’m only able to access 3 of them?
If your data is important, you might want to wait for someone like @chrismurphy to advise what the safest method of repairing the filesystem might be. I’ve never repaired a Btrfs filesystem myself, so I don’t know how likely or unlikely the various methods are to work or to make the system worse. Btrfs appears to have multiple repair commands (btrfs check, btrfs rescue, ???).
If you have a spare disk that you can clone your existing filesystem to, that would be a good thing to do while you wait (I don’t think Chris is likely to respond on a weekend). The secondary disk would need to be at least as large as the partition you are cloning and you can use a tool like dd (disk dump) to make the copy (dd will make an exact copy – errors and all).
Maybe the Live CD is trying to mount your corrupt Btrfs partition? It doesn’t seem like that ought to prevent it from booting though. Does it work if you disconnect (or disable) your internal drive with the bad Btrfs filesystem?
Other than that, I would suggest checking your system’s memory with a tool like Memtest86+.
Yeah it seemed to fix itself when I just took out the live USB and put it back in so fortunately I can still access the liveos. Ill try testing memory usage. Hopefully that will give some clues on what the issue could be.
The LiveOS has very limited storage for installing things. It is a known problem with the Fedora LiveOS image. If you search this forum, you might be able to find some hints about how to configure “persistent storage” for a LiveOS image. Unfortunately, I think that is a bit more complicated than it should be right now due in part to some bugs with how it handles the overlay images.
Also, the LiveOS isn’t designed to continue working if you remove and reconnect the USB device it is running from.
Update: Apparently this is an I/O problem indicative of drive failure. Fedora disks says I have a 34gb loop device. /dev/loop2. I tried mount/dev/loop2 and terminal returned “no such file or directory”
Not necessarily. Things like hard powering off a system or physically disconnecting a drive while it is running can cause filesystem corruption. Defective hardware isn’t always to blame (“user error” or software bugs are also a possibilities ).
The /dev/loop2 issue is likely just an artifact from running a LiveOS. The LiveOS does “strange” things with overlays (and loopback devices) as part of the way it works. They can even appear and disappear (and change sizes) at runtime. I wouldn’t concern myself too much about the /dev/loop2 device. The “real” devices that you need to worry about are typically named /dev/sd[L] where [L] is some letter.
Sometimes it is correct to mount /dev/sdX. More typically, however, a drive will be “partitioned” into (potentially) multiple filesystems. It is the filesystem that you “mount”, not the drive. So if there is a /dev/sda1 or a /dev/sda2, you will want to mount one of those rather than the bare /dev/sda. Use lsblk to get a overview of how your “block” devices are partitioned.
You’ll likely need to run some sort of filesystem repair. It is not unheard of that a hard power-off can cause that sort of filesystem problem.
