Arch Linux

Lynxrc

Member

Registered: 2015-10-13

Posts: 9

[Solved] Can't boot, can't write to the boot partition

After a regular pacman -Syu, I rebooted the system, and immediately after the boot menu this message appeared on the screen:

EFI stub: ERROR: failed to read file.
Trying to load files to higher address
EFI stub: ERROR: failed to read file.

Just a few days ago I had enabled NVIDIA DRM kernel mode setting and because pacman updated the nvidia package and ran the initramfs hook, I thought it was the cause for this problem.

So I booted a live usb, mounted /root and /boot and tried to remove the "nvidia-drm.modeset=1" from the boot loader entry. but I couln't edit the file. Trying to save it in vim gives an error:

E667: Fsync failed

Trying to edit it with nano or simply echoing into the file seems to work at first, but after umounting and re-mounting the partition it fails:

cat: /mnt/boot/loader/entries/arch.conf: Input/output error

Could the disk be failing or is it something else? Parted lists the partitions just fines, shows the correct flags and says that they are aligned correcly.

lsblk:

NAME            FSTYPE      LABEL           UUID                                   MOUNTPOINT
...
sdd                                                                                
├─sdd1          vfat                        5E9B-4FC2                              /mnt/boot
└─sdd2          crypto_LUKS                 b650257e-0c40-4dac-ab1a-08efa7a3da08   
  └─arch        LVM2_member                 fDyl2q-pmeQ-wwEo-Y3xi-WYWc-mH2m-0EFP0u 
    ├─arch-swap swap                        1b2488d7-b38d-44ba-9fb4-01d87bbfdb1a   
    └─arch-root ext4                        d0023e59-a419-4f9e-a9bb-1c149ac9dbc9   /mnt
...

Also, for some reason df -h says the boot partition's size  is 488M, but should be ~255M. Is that normal?

Filesystem             Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
...
/dev/mapper/arch-root  100G   29G   66G  31% /mnt
/dev/sdd1              488M   45M  443M  10% /mnt/boot

Last edited by Lynxrc (2016-10-23 08:38:40)

Head_on_a_Stick

Member

From: London

Registered: 2014-02-20

Posts: 7,732

Website

Re: [Solved] Can't boot, can't write to the boot partition

So I booted a live usb, mounted /root and /boot

What were the *exact* commands that you used?

Why did you bother mounting the root filesystem if only /boot needed to be changed?

What happens if you use `arch-chroot` and try modifying the files?

What are the permissions on the loader.conf before you try to edit it?

What does /proc/self/mounts say about the mount options for /dev/sdd1?

---

Are you infected with Wetiko?

Lynxrc

Member

Registered: 2015-10-13

Posts: 9

Re: [Solved] Can't boot, can't write to the boot partition

What were the *exact* commands that you used?

# cryptsetup open /dev/sdd2 arch
# mount /dev/mapper/arch-root /mnt
# mount /dev/sdd1 /mnt/boot

Why did you bother mounting the root filesystem if only /boot needed to be changed?

After changing the boot entry I was also going to edit mkinitcpio.conf and re-generate initramfs. Now I tried to only mount /boot, but the same errors occur.

What happens if you use `arch-chroot` and try modifying the files?

The same errors.

What are the permissions on the loader.conf before you try to edit it?

rwxr-xr-x root root

What does /proc/self/mounts say about the mount options for /dev/sdd1?

/dev/sdd1 /mnt vfat rw,relatime,fmask=0022,dmask=0022,codepage=437,iocharset=iso8859-1,shortname=mixed,errors=remount-ro 0 0

Last edited by Lynxrc (2016-09-11 16:55:05)

Head_on_a_Stick

Member

From: London

Registered: 2014-02-20

Posts: 7,732

Website

Re: [Solved] Can't boot, can't write to the boot partition

(Sorry for the delayed response)

Looks like it may be a disk problem then.

Have you tried a SMART test?

Backup ASAP, ofc.

---

Are you infected with Wetiko?

Lynxrc

Member

Registered: 2015-10-13

Posts: 9

Re: [Solved] Can't boot, can't write to the boot partition

Sorry for bumping this old thread, but I finally got around to fixing this and thought that I should write the solution here if someone with the same problem ever finds this thread.

So, the disk seemed to be just fine, SMART reported no problems. On the other hand, fsck.vfat printed some seeking error and the OS thought that the file system was two times larger than the actual partition.

The logical conclusion was that somehow the file system got FUBAR'd, so just I wiped it, re-created it and reinstalled the bootloader and kernel. Now everything seems to be working fine.