Booting issues

[Kinkaid, Kyle]

Hi Fedora Wearers,

I'm having some boot problems on my Fedora 18 workstation, KDE Spin.

System background:
I have a Dell Precision workstation, with two HDs, and full disk
encryption.  The two HDs are combined into three logical volumes, swap,
root, and /home.

Issue background:
I walked away from my computer and decided to enable screensaver and lock
by using the "screen lock" hot corder (sorry, forgot the KDE term).  When I
came back the screen saver hadn't locked and I couldn't move the mouse
(system clock on the Task Manager hadn't moved either).  I tried to recover
using various key presses, including Ctrl-Alt-F-key to open a new
terminal.  Eventually I gave up and hard rebooted because nothing seemed to
work to unfreeze my system.

Current state:
After the hard reboot, Grub loads, the kernel starts and I type in my
encryption password like normal.  But it eventually dumps me into emergency
mode, asking for root password.  The file system is mounted RW and all my
files seem to be there as normal.  When I type 'runlevel' it says "runlevel
unknown' and an 'init 3' or 'init 5' command brings up the Fedora booting
splash screen but drops me back to the command prompt without allowing me
to login.

What I've tried:
I checked the documentation (e.g.
herehttp://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/15/html/Installation_Guide/ap-rescuemode.html)
and most of that seems to refer to grub not working, or volumes not
mounting, none of which applies to me.  I checked /var/log/messages but
nothing seems to be obviously wrong in the logs.

Any advice on what could be wrong or what to try next?

Thanks,
Kyle

[Kinkaid, Kyle]

I've solved my own problem!

As I dug around the boot up process a little, I found a curious message
about /mnt/usbdisk which was a usb drive I had setup shortly before all the
latest bit happened.  I guess the init process was hanging when it was
trying to mount the usb drive and that was halting the whole process.
After I removed the offending entry from /etc/fstab all boots up normally
now.

Thanks for all those who took the time to read and ponder my message.

-Kyle

On Tue, Mar 26, 2013 at 10:28 AM, Kinkaid, Kyle  wrote:
> Hi Fedora Wearers,
>
> I'm having some boot problems on my Fedora 18 workstation, KDE Spin.
>
> System background:
> I have a Dell Precision workstation, with two HDs, and full disk
> encryption.  The two HDs are combined into three logical volumes, swap,
> root, and /home.
>
> Issue background:
> I walked away from my computer and decided to enable screensaver and lock
> by using the "screen lock" hot corder (sorry, forgot the KDE term).  When I
> came back the screen saver hadn't locked and I couldn't move the mouse
> (system clock on the Task Manager hadn't moved either).  I tried to recover
> using various key presses, including Ctrl-Alt-F-key to open a new
> terminal.  Eventually I gave up and hard rebooted because nothing seemed to
> work to unfreeze my system.
>
> Current state:
> After the hard reboot, Grub loads, the kernel starts and I type in my
> encryption password like normal.  But it eventually dumps me into emergency
> mode, asking for root password.  The file system is mounted RW and all my
> files seem to be there as normal.  When I type 'runlevel' it says "runlevel
> unknown' and an 'init 3' or 'init 5' command brings up the Fedora booting
> splash screen but drops me back to the command prompt without allowing me
> to login.
>
> What I've tried:
> I checked the documentation (e.g. herehttp://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/15/html/Installation_Guide/ap-rescuemode.html)
> and most of that seems to refer to grub not working, or volumes not
> mounting, none of which applies to me.  I checked /var/log/messages but
> nothing seems to be obviously wrong in the logs.
>
> Any advice on what could be wrong or what to try next?
>
> Thanks,
> Kyle

[Reindl Harald]

Am 26.03.2013 22:28, schrieb Kinkaid:
> As I dug around the boot up process a little, I found a curious message about /mnt/usbdisk which was a usb drive I
> had setup shortly before all the latest bit happened.  I guess the init process was hanging when it was trying to
> mount the usb drive and that was halting the whole process.  After I removed the offending entry from /etc/fstab
> all boots up normally now

"noauto" is your friend and the last bit to zero which indicates at least "no fsck"
never configure temporary drives as like built-in ones

[root@localhost:~]$ cat /etc/fstab  | grep noauto
UUID=ea140964-634c-4fce-b587-9ce6a21b4cf9  /mnt/fileserver-backup  ext4 rw,noexec,noatime,noauto  0 0

[Richard Vickery]

On Tue, Mar 26, 2013 at 10:28 AM, Kinkaid, Kyle  wrote:
> Hi Fedora Wearers,
>
> I'm having some boot problems on my Fedora 18 workstation, KDE Spin.
>
> System background:
> I have a Dell Precision workstation, with two HDs, and full disk
> encryption.  The two HDs are combined into three logical volumes, swap,
> root, and /home.
>
> Issue background:
> I walked away from my computer and decided to enable screensaver and lock
> by using the "screen lock" hot corder (sorry, forgot the KDE term).  When I
> came back the screen saver hadn't locked and I couldn't move the mouse
> (system clock on the Task Manager hadn't moved either).  I tried to recover
> using various key presses, including Ctrl-Alt-F-key to open a new
> terminal.  Eventually I gave up and hard rebooted because nothing seemed to
> work to unfreeze my system.
>
> Current state:
> After the hard reboot, Grub loads, the kernel starts and I type in my
> encryption password like normal.  But it eventually dumps me into emergency
> mode, asking for root password.  The file system is mounted RW and all my
> files seem to be there as normal.  When I type 'runlevel' it says "runlevel
> unknown' and an 'init 3' or 'init 5' command brings up the Fedora booting
> splash screen but drops me back to the command prompt without allowing me
> to login.
>
> What I've tried:
> I checked the documentation (e.g. herehttp://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/15/html/Installation_Guide/ap-rescuemode.html)
> and most of that seems to refer to grub not working, or volumes not
> mounting, none of which applies to me.  I checked /var/log/messages but
> nothing seems to be obviously wrong in the logs.
>
> Any advice on what could be wrong or what to try next?
>
> Thanks,
> Kyle
>
> --
> users mailing list
> [e-mail]
> To unsubscribe or change subscription options:
> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users
> Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
> Have a question? Ask away: http://ask.fedoraproject.org

I think I had a like problem to this that I solved by putting the
partitions on the same drive, rather than using separate ones.

Richard

[Tim]

Kinkaid, Kyle:
> > I'm having some boot problems on my Fedora 18 workstation, KDE Spin.
> >
> > System background:
> >
> > I have a Dell Precision workstation, with two HDs, and full disk
> > encryption.  The two HDs are combined into three logical volumes,
> > swap, root, and /home.

Richard Vickery:
> I think I had a like problem to this that I solved by putting the
> partitions on the same drive, rather than using separate ones.

That should not be necessary.  And would break a very normal system
setup of using separate drives, even more so than the blasted can't have
a separate /usr thing that happened recently.

I've used separate home drives, in the past, as a very simple way of
being able to safely update a server without any chance of screwing up
user data.  Others have used separate swap drives as a way of speeding
up swap, should you ever be stuck with having to make use of it.  It's
bad enough to have to use a drive for swap space, without having to put
up with the thrashing of alternating between swapping and everything
else it's trying to access on the drive.

Anyway, I note the original poster says they've solved their problem.