Linux beginner here. I just installed fedora for the first time last night and within an hour I already screwed it up. While trying to install KDE on gnome, I had used the terminal to disable gdm. I hadn’t realized that I was supposed to enable sddm before rebooting and now I’ve been stuck in emergency mode since last night
Here’s (some of) what it’s telling me
"Cannot open access to console, the root account is locked.
See sulogin(8) man page for more details.
Press Enter to continue."
I pressed enter and I get two warnings, one that not all disks have been found and another saying I may want to regenerate my initrams, whatever that even means.
I can’t type anything in here, nothing shows up. Nothing I press does anything, and I can’t even turn the thing off. I really screwed up big time and I’m just hoping I didn’t fry my laptop trying to get this running.
It would be safe for you to reboot using the live install media to recover.
It normally is not recommended to install Workstation with gnome then also install the KDE desktop (DE) as well. It usually is much better to install Workstation (gnome) or KDE cleanly so the user does not have both DEs causing potential differences.
My suggestion, since this is a clean new install and seems to have nothing that needs saving would be to just do a new clean install to recover. It is difficult for us to know what all may have been changed and thus a new install provides a clean setup to work with.
Just in case something similar happens in the future you can enable the root account by using sudo passwd root and entering a password which would then allow you to enter that password and continue when in emergency mode.
I’m planning on doing a clean install, but I can’t exactly do that when I’m not getting to the boot menu and I’m stuck on emergency mode. I took the battery out twice, first time it took me to the boot menu and the second time it didn’t and I am once again at a loss for what to do.
Stuck in emergency mode after removing the battery?
This implies that when you powered it back on you failed to tell it to boot from the usb so it is trying again (and failing) to boot properly from the drive.
You need to use the bios to select the usb device for booting.
Usually F1, F2, or Del will get into the bios setup and F10, F11, or F12 will get the bios boot menu to select the boot device.
Those keys need to be pressed repeatedly when first powering on until the appropriate screen appears. On my system the bios splash screen tells which keys to use.
There may be additional issues in getting into bios if bios fast boot is enabled. I did that once by mistake on my desktop and had to reset the bios to default before I could even access the bios setup menus.
You may be able to boot from live media and recover the root password as shown here.
