Fedora fails to boot with systemd-journald failing

[Daniel Landau]

Hi all,

On Sun, Oct 7, 2012 at 12:30 PM, Joe Zeff <joe at zeff.us> wrote:
>
> Did you back up anything before starting?
>

Not really, no, but doing it now.


On Sun, Oct 7, 2012 at 10:17 AM, Frank Murphy <frankly3d at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 07/10/12 10:21, Daniel Landau wrote:
>> My computer is in a totally useless state, as I can not boot at all.
>> What I did was I tried to join my root, boot and home partitions into
>> one.
>
> Explain what is the name of the One?

Not really sure what you mean by this. It's name is /dev/sda5 perhaps?

On Sun, Oct 7, 2012 at 10:01 AM, Frank Murphy <frankly3d at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 07/10/12 14:22, Matthew Miller wrote:
>> So, how can Daniel find exactly what is making this system fail to boot?
>
> Thats' known already, he moved stuff, and libs\configs etc,
> are now in a maze.

Why should libs and configs care about the partitions as long as
everything is mounted correctly?

>> Is there a way to turn on more helpful debugging output?
>
> Yes, reinstall

That's not really helpful.

On Sun, Oct 7, 2012 at 7:14 AM, Tim <ignored_mailbox at yahoo.com.au> wrote:
> On Sun, 2012-10-07 at 12:21 +0300, Daniel Landau wrote:
>> What I did was I tried to join my root, boot and home partitions into
>> one.
>
> Not really a good idea, but most particularly not keeping boot separate.
> Nothing wrong with the other stuff being on one partition, you just need
> to make the change carefully.

There's no reason why you couldn't keep everything on one partition.
One possible reason could be having an ext2 boot partition and
something more exciting for the rest, but I don't think my problem is
with booting off ext4.

>
>> I copied the files, updated the grub config and /etc/fstab and
>> recreated the initramfs, all this from a live Fedora environment.
>
> I think you're going to go into much more explicit detail about what you
> did before anyone can give you accurate help.

Ok, what I did step by step:

1. Boot into a live Fedora environment.
2. Mount all the partitions that the Fedora installer created for me,
i.e. boot, root and home
3. The home partitions was in the place I wanted it, and the correct
size so I chose it to be my new all-in-one partition.
4. I created a new directory home in my partition and moved the user's
home directories there
5. I copied everything from my root partition (except for the empty
home dir) to the all-in-one partition. I figured this should be fine,
since it wasn't running, so no dirt in proc. I'm not really sure about
whether I should have omitted something, because I'm not such an
expert.
6. In the previous step, an empty boot directory got transferred into
the partition, so I just copied the contents of the boot partition
there.
7. At this stage, the grub config was all wrong, so I updated it with
grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg. It found the Fedora install
and seemed to be by all accounts fine.
8. I updated /etc/fstab from having mounts with different UUIDs to
having just /dev/sda5 at root (/), because that's what I have now.
9. Some googling/duckduckgoing led me to believe, that
systemd-journald has something to do with the initramfs, mainly
starting there. I don't really know what this means. The link is here:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=835867. Also this step
didn't have any effect as far as I can tell.

And that's where I'm now. Some help would be appreciated.

Daniel Landau