Failure to boot after update today

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1

The problem

This morning, I shut down my PC with “install pending software updates” checked and walked out of the house. When I arrived home, I found this on the screen:

[    6.513712] dracut-pre-udev[605]: sh: line 1: /sbin/sysctl: No such file or directory
You are in emergency mode. After logging in, type "journalctl -xb" to view
system logs, "systemctl reboot" to reboot, or "exit"

Cannot open access to console, the root account is locked.
See sulogin(8) man page for more details.

Press Enter to continue

After pressing pressing enter, I see:

Reloading system manager configuration.
Starting default.target

After a few moments, this is followed by the emergency mode message again, and the loop just continues like that. I can’t type anything, so I’m not able to use journalctl.

What i’ve tried to fix the problem

I searched and found a post with a similar problem here. Our error codes are slightly different so we might not be having the exact same problem. I booted into a live ISO and ran the same filesystem checks.

I had Fedora installed on an NVME in this system. I am able to see the device in lsblk output. I am able to mount and read files on all three partitions.

nvme0n1     259:0    0 476.9G  0 disk 
├─nvme0n1p1 259:1    0   600M  0 part /run/media/liveuser/427E-EFA0
├─nvme0n1p2 259:2    0     1G  0 part /run/media/liveuser/20096224-3fc7-46a6-ac01-0fd9b226363c
└─nvme0n1p3 259:3    0 475.4G  0 part /run/media/liveuser/fedora_localhost-live

BTRFS check…

root@localhost-live:~# btrfs check /dev/nvme0n1p3
Opening filesystem to check...
Checking filesystem on /dev/nvme0n1p3
UUID: 60d5e9d6-a055-4600-8630-e471e5c337bc
[1/7] checking root items
[2/7] checking extents
[3/7] checking free space tree
[4/7] checking fs roots
[5/7] checking only csums items (without verifying data)
[6/7] checking root refs
[7/7] checking quota groups skipped (not enabled on this FS)
found 260355325952 bytes used, no error found
total csum bytes: 181346696
total tree bytes: 1370570752
total fs tree bytes: 1063895040
total extent tree bytes: 92422144
btree space waste bytes: 299960621
file data blocks allocated: 467175002112
 referenced 280982261760

fsck on the other two partitions:

root@localhost-live:~# fsck /dev/nvme0n1p1
fsck from util-linux 2.40-rc1
fsck.fat 4.2 (2021-01-31)
There are differences between boot sector and its backup.
This is mostly harmless. Differences: (offset:original/backup)
  65:01/00
1) Copy original to backup
2) Copy backup to original
3) No action
[123?q]? 2

*** Filesystem was changed ***
The changes have not yet been written, you can still choose to leave the
filesystem unmodified:
1) Write changes
2) Leave filesystem unchanged
[12?q]? 1
/dev/nvme0n1p1: 24 files, 4871/153296 clusters
root@localhost-live:~# fsck /dev/nvme0n1p2
fsck from util-linux 2.40-rc1
e2fsck 1.47.0 (5-Feb-2023)
/dev/nvme0n1p2: clean, 43/65536 files, 101844/262144 blocks

This output is actually from my second time through fsck. The first time, I chose no action whenever prompted, and the second partition had a “dirty bit”. But after copying the backup, I didn’t see that error again.

After this, I rebooted and was confronted with the same emergency mode message again. Don’t know where to go from here. While I wait for your advice, I’m going to backup my user home directories.

Update

After backing up my user home dirs to another disk on the system, I remembered another recent change. There’s a 250 GB disk in the system that I keep my Steam games on. I usually mount this before launching Steam. Yesterday, I decided I want it mounted at boot, so I added it to /etc/fstab. I thought it unlikely but while I was in the live environment, I commented out that line, rebooted and I’m back! That fixed the boot problem!

Now my question is… Why? I would like to have that disk mounted at boot time, so I would like to understand why this happened and how I can fix it.

My fstab file:

# /etc/fstab
# Created by anaconda on Tue Dec 20 09:19:52 2022
#
# Accessible filesystems, by reference, are maintained under '/dev/disk/'.
# See man pages fstab(5), findfs(8), mount(8) and/or blkid(8) for more info.
#
# After editing this file, run 'systemctl daemon-reload' to update systemd
# units generated from this file.
#
# Filesystems setup automatically at install:
UUID=60d5e9d6-a055-4600-8630-e471e5c337bc /                       btrfs   subvol=root,compress=zstd:1 0 0
UUID=20096224-3fc7-46a6-ac01-0fd9b226363c /boot                   ext4    defaults        1 2
UUID=427E-EFA0          /boot/efi               vfat    umask=0077,shortname=winnt 0 2
UUID=60d5e9d6-a055-4600-8630-e471e5c337bc /home                   btrfs   subvol=home,compress=zstd:1 0 0

# Extra HDD's and SSD's:
## Cuda
UUID=47a943d6-8850-4172-b1fa-f2b181c504e5	/mnt/cuda	ext4	users,rw,auto,exec	0 0
## Steam
#UUID=f8cd1919-aabf-4b9d-9b47-786ca2d14843	/mnt/steam	ext4	users,rw,auto,exec	0 0

Running fsck on that partition also returns clean, so I don’t see why this should cause any problems.

2

First thing to try is to boot the prevous kernel.
Does that work?

dracut-pre-udev[605]: sh: line 1: /sbin/sysctl: No such file or directory

Seems your initrd has a problem.

Did you run out of disk space? Especically in /boot.

What does lsblk -f report?

3

Just put a password for the root user. For security reasons on the Workstation the root user comes with a empty PW which locks it.

1 Like
4
  1. Verify the UUID for the steam partition matches what is in fstab
  2. Consider adding the option nofail to the options for those two partitions (cuda and steam) so the system will continue to boot even if the mount fails.

Once the system boots cleanly then check to find out why it may not mount.
To confirm the entry is fstab is correct and works you can always make such an entry then test that entry with the mount command.

In your case testing the entry for the steam partition as your user would simply be mount /mnt/steam. If that works then the entry would be valid.

5

Thanks for the help! I wound up using gnome-disks to mount the partition at startup. That way I avoid any typos that might futz up my fstab. Still not exactly sure what was wrong in the first place but now it’s all working.