Fedora is not booting up after I took ownership of systems drive

Previously I accidentally took ownership of my systems drive at that time I saw that the shutdown button was disabled so I thought there might be something wrong so I forcefully sutdown and now I am seeing following message on my boot up screen:

[TIME] Timed out waiting for device dev-zram0.device - /dev/zram0.
[DEPEND] Dependency failed for dev-zram0.swap - compressed swap on /dev/zram0.
[DEPEND] Dependency failed for system-zram-setup@zram0.service - create /dev/zram0.

I did not try anything because I’m new to linux and I don’t have any access to cmd currently so anyone can please help me out

Those messages seem unrelated, they are about zram.

Zram, in the way that is configured in Fedora by default, will take a part of your RAM and make it available as swap with some compression.
That will allow you to kinda of use more RAM than you actually have.

I will need more useful logs to help you.

Can you try pressing Esc while the machine is booting and check for any other interesting messages?

Unfortunately no, I do not see any other message. It happened because I pressed the take ownership button in drive and then I shutdown forcefully and now I’m not able to boot up my device.

No idea what you mean by that. What is a ā€œtake ownership buttonā€?

Take ownership of my localhost systems drive its actually in drive’s settings > ssd drive > setting munu > take ownership

I asked around on Matrix about what ā€œtake ownershipā€ does and got this:

So you might be able to recover, but worst case scenario you will need a full reinstall.

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Thanks, now I’m installing fedora-37 silverblue but my installing screen stucks. I’ve included the image below: it says ā€˜Finished plymouth-quit.service - Terminate Plymouth Boot Screen.’

A one more thing I want to include here is that before starting this screen it says following thanks in advance:

Yes, this is exactly what I thought would happen. Just to add some context:

  • In Linux, users are not recognized by their name, but rather by ther uid, a user identification
  • all non-system users’ identifications start with 1000 and go above.
  • system users (various users needed by the system, such as ftp, gdm) keep their IDs bellow 1000.
  • the root users always has the 0 ID.

What happened when you claimed the ownership was, that probably all files and directories were given to you, so now they are owned by user 1000. However, system services often cannot start when their files are not owned by a particular system user or root. For example, an ftp server will not start when its files are not owned by the ftp user.

You could, of course, change the ownership back easily, if you knew which file should belong to whom. However, as you do not have this kind of information anywhere and you probably do not remember the correct ownership of those files, the only solution is to reinstall the system.

If your disk is btrfs, there are ways to reinstall without having to remove the home folder which might save your data.

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This is not incorrect. The plymouth service is a service that displays the nice booting screen with the Fedora logo and the spinning wheel and also the messages (that you have nicely photographed). When the service is no longer needed, after the boot, it will stop.

The question is why the installer has not started.

  • How long did you wait at this point?
  • What kind of graphic card are you using?

What Desktop Environment are you using and where did you see such function to ā€œtake ownershipā€?

I believe it’s an option from inside Gnome Disks.

never noticed. would love to see a screenshot.

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I have this from a bit later of the other Gnome room screenshot.

With this being one of the links: UDisksFilesystem: UDisks Reference Manual

Saw in Gnome Disks now, never noticed before. Not a good idea to mess around with that option.
@usman for which partition did you do that?

Screenshots for reference for anybody else:

Captura de tela de 2023-03-09 13-34-34

That all allowed on the root partition, making it very likely to bork the system.

Also…

Captura de tela de 2023-03-09 13-36-59

Hopefully somebody has already filled or will file an issue (I believe it belongs on Udisks instead of Gnome Disks):

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Interesting. In order to change the ownership of a file with chown you need to be root, or use sudo. From what’s written above, that utility allows any regular user to take ownership of anything, with the obvious potential to bork the system as seen here. How something so dangerous was ever allowed to be part of Fedora is incomprehensible. I don’t use Gnome, but I’d really, really appreciate it if somebody who does would open a Bugzilla on this ASAP!

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No, it requests admin authentication for confirmation.

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The action could be reversible from a live system using chown.

However, if it was my system, I’d backup anything important and then reinstall. Seems to be the cleanest, maybe even fastest solution.

That is, assuming you know the correct owners (could be easy if not running the recursive version) or some tool knows the correct owners (Maybe DNf could be used for this if it has a "reinstall every package feature?)

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