Arch Linux

Nexsy

Member

Registered: 2023-05-27

Posts: 13

[SOLVED] Fail to boot after -Syu, backup initramfs works normally

Soooo, yesterday before heading to bed I did a full system update using yay, everything finished normally. I shut down my PC and went to bed.

Today as I turn on my PC the boot hangs at "initializing ramdisk" for about a minute and then throws me into an emergency shell

ERROR: device 'UUID=(correct uuid of my boot drive)' not found, Skipping fsck
mount: /new_root: can't find UUID=(same uuid)
ERROR failed to mount 'UUID=(same uuid) on real root
You are not being dropped into an emergency shell
sh: can't access tty: Job control turned off

After a reboot and the same error I booted up arch with the backup initramfs and it loaded perfectly.
I don't even know where to begin with debugging it on my own.

lsblk (for the drive in question):
NAME        MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
nvme1n1     259:5    0 931.5G  0 disk
├─nvme1n1p1 259:6    0   511M  0 part /boot
└─nvme1n1p2 259:7    0   931G  0 part /

fstab (for the drive in question)
# /dev/nvme1n1p2
UUID=e38e4cef-715f-44dc-b273-bcabb3355bec   /      ext4   rw,relatime      0 1
# /dev/nvme1n1p1
UUID=26ED-29ED    /boot            vfat   rw,relatime,fmask=0022,dmask=0022,codepage=437,iocharset=ascii,shortname=mixed,utf8,errors=remount-ro   0 2

EDIT: I ran "mkinitcpio -p linux" in terminal while booted into the fallback mode, literally as a hail mary and that...fixed my issue. I would love to know what caused that tho.

Last edited by Nexsy (2023-11-15 10:19:35)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,234

Re: [SOLVED] Fail to boot after -Syu, backup initramfs works normally

There can be a race condition with udev rules getting reloaded and mkinitcpio wanting to generate the initramfs which leads to a loading failure, see this most recent thread about this: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=289336

Multiple ways around this, disable retriggering of udev devices or try the mkinitcpio patches floating around in that thread.

In any case, please mark as [SOLVED] by editing the title in your first post.

Last edited by V1del (2023-11-15 09:40:02)