I have installed a Dual Boot partition on my laptop with Fedora 37 workstation vanilla gnome and Windows 11. Premise, I use mainly Fedora and I have not used Windows 11 since April/May.
Last week the partition suddenly broke. Every time I tried to access the Fedora partition the Dracut emergency shell showed up, but I was not able to solve the issue by using “lvscan” as I read in different guides. I had to restore my Windows partition to factory settings since it was the only accessible part.
How can I make sure that this is not a hardware problem?
If I scratch the partition and install Fedora again, how can I be sure that this problem will not show up again since I lost all my work data?
The ‘lvscan’ command will not work on a default fedora install for more than 2 years now. Fedora has switched from LVM with ext4 to using btrfs file systems. File system management is much different than most online tutorials.
The windows partitions usually have no affect at all since fedora does not even mount them by default. Restoring them to factory default may simply mean one has totally wiped out fedora beyond hope of recovery (or may not – it just depends upon what was actually done).
Had one posted here while the problem was new and before making alterations it is possible it could have been identified and repaired by proper troubleshooting. After alterations that becomes very difficult or impossible.
No one can tell you it will not happen again until we have enough info to analyze the situation.
Just as a quick idea for planning.
How large was the partition used for fedora? With btrfs fedora uses one partition for the btrfs volume which is shared with the root subvolume and the home subvolume. If that volume fills up it may cause severe problems and having it shared means the user must pay attention to the total space used and free.
My disk has 476,81 GB. The Windows partition has 197GB, while the Fedora one 254 GB. Then I have 16GB for the Swap and the rest is divided in little partitions of 1GB that I don’t remember what their role was.