[SOLVED] Cant mount installation disk when rebooting from hibernation

meimoo · 2017-07-01 08:48:26

I recently installed arch on my laptop (an XPS 13), with a grub efi boot configuration. Everything was working really smoothly until, while I was installing some packages, my laptop died because I wasn't paying attention to the battery. After I plugged in my laptop and attempted to boot it again, I was dumped into the emergency shell with these errors:

ERROR: resume: hibernation device 'UUID=(insert uuid here)' not found
ERROR: device 'UUID=(insert same uuid here)' not found. Skipping fsck.
mount: can't find UUID=(insert same uuid here)
You are now being dropped into an emergency shell.

Then I booted a live usb in attempt to mount and chroot the ssd I installed arch on so maybe I could take a look at my fstab and make sure the error UUID matches the one in the fstab, but when I try to list all the disks available, the 200 something gigabyte SSD doesn't come up at all. Only the efi partition and the live usb comes up.

fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 7.5 GiB, 8004304896 bytes, 15633408 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x14d02df6

Device     Boot Start     End Sectors  Size Id Type
/dev/sda1  *        0 3966463 3966464  1.9G  0 Empty
/dev/sda2         164  131235  131072   64M ef EFI (FAT-12/16/32)


Disk /dev/loop0: 1.8 GiB, 1926041600 bytes, 3761800 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes

Any help for finding my installation that seems to have run away?

Last edited by meimoo (2017-07-05 05:52:55)

Trilby · 2017-07-01 12:16:20

I'm not sure why it'd not show up from the live usb, but you should be able to repair everything from the emergency shell. You should run the appropriate fscks on each partition from the emergency shell. That itself may be sufficient to be able to reboot normally.

meimoo · 2017-07-01 18:43:33

I tried running a couple of different things, but I always get the same response from the emergency shell:

sh: mkinitcpio not found
sh: tune2fs not found
sh: fscks not found

Trilby · 2017-07-01 18:47:47

I'm not surprised that the first two are not in the initramfs. The third one does not exist at all. fsck, however, will be available in the emeregency shell / initramfs - or at least one of it's variants (e.g., fsck.ext4) will be.

The initramfs is a minimal filesystem with only the few tools needed to get the system set up and chroot into the real root. This all can be done manually: fsck, mount the real root, then chroot. Just normally we have our init system handle most of that for us seemlessly.

EDIT: Sorry, I seem to have misled you. I was saying to run the appropriate fscks as the plural form of fsck. It would be good to familiarize yourself with these tools so they are not foreign to you: arch is a bleeding edge distro, and arch users should be ready to patch things up here and there - or at very least be familiar enough with the tools to be guided in patching things up.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fsck

meimoo · 2017-07-01 18:52:20

Okay, sorry, yes. If fsck -a responds to

fsck from util-linux 2.29.2

How do I go about mounting the root partition without knowing it's name, location, or otherwise?

Trilby · 2017-07-01 18:57:53

fsck -a can work in a real system, but it will not likely do anything in the initramfs as all it does is scan /etc/fstab for partitions to fsck. As there is no /etc/fstab in the initramfs, that command liikely did not do anything. You should check each of your partitions directly:

fsck /dev/sda1
fsck /dev/sda2
...

Note the sda1 and sda2 were just made up guesses - you should know how many partitions you have and what order they were in which also goes to your question about the root partition: `ls /dev/` will list it with a bunch of other stuff. `ls /dev/sd*` might be more helpful. As to which one is your root partition, you'd have to tell me.

But on topic - I doubt you'll have to manually mount your root partition. I was describing the process that normally happens. I suspect once you run a fsck, fsck will prompt you to repair one of the filesystems - say yes, let it do it's magic, then you should be able to reboot and everything should work normally (perhaps this is a bit optimistic, but not unrealistic as I suspect the only problem is an uncleanly unmounted filesystem).

meimoo · 2017-07-01 19:05:17

I think I'm back to my original difficulty, where the partition seems to have disappeared entirely. The ls for the dev directory returns sda, sda1 and sda2, but the root partition should be sda3. fsck on those three partitions returns the same response as fsck -a, except when I try for sda3, where it just tells me the device is nonexistent.

Trilby · 2017-07-01 19:15:52

Hmm, from rereading your first post, I doubt it'd be sda3, perhaps sdb1? From the initramfs does the following list anything other than sda:

ls /dev/sd?

If not, this is more likely a hardware problem: if it's a separate disk, you could check cable/socket connections.

meimoo · 2017-07-01 19:20:35

Ahh you're probably right ^^" No other sd anything present. This is the ssd that comes internally in the laptop, so no cable fiddling or anything. I don't think (?) it's a hardware failure, as it's a pretty new laptop and there were absolutely no symptoms leading up to this.

tom.ty89 · 2017-07-02 02:14:24

meimoo wrote:

Then I booted a live usb in attempt to mount and chroot the ssd I installed arch on so maybe I could take a look at my fstab and make sure the error UUID matches the one in the fstab, but when I try to list all the disks available, the 200 something gigabyte SSD doesn't come up at all.

You can check for a few times whether the SSD only "disappears" if you booted "from a hibernation", that is, does it appear if you poweroff from your SSD then boot to a live usb, but disappear if you hibernate from your SSD then boot to a live usb.

Sounds to me like a UEFI/BIOS firmware defect.

meimoo · 2017-07-02 03:47:53

A bios firmware error sounds very likely to me. When I was first installing arch, I had an installation of arch (grub without uefi) already along side windows, and I wanted to wipe the entire drive just for arch. When booting the live USB to wipe the ssd, if I booted the USB from the uefi boot it wouldn't detect the ssd, but it would if I booted it legacy boot without the uefi. After I deleted the partitions and changed the table from mbr to gpt I didn't have any problems seeing the ssd when I booted the USB from the uefi boot... Until now. Except, I can't see if it will boot from not hibernation if I can't boot into the ssd to power it off.

tom.ty89 · 2017-07-02 04:11:25

At least unplug your machine from power for a while before trying booting the ssd again. You may even want to eject and reinsert the CMOS battery on the motherboard.

Last edited by tom.ty89 (2017-07-02 04:12:07)

meimoo · 2017-07-02 13:15:20

I left it unplugged all night last night and all day today with no changes. The entire laptop is quite thin with the screws flushed into the body (ala macbook air) and no removable battery, so messing around with the components is not happening unless I want to send it back to Dell. Any other ideas... Haha.

Trilby · 2017-07-02 13:46:34

I'm not sure if I missed it in the thread somewhere, but have you tried another distro and/or OS? If other distros/OSs don't see the device, then it is definitely not a software problem*. It would likely be hardware, or could be BIOS/EFI firmware.

*note: that's not to say we wouldn't help with hardware/firmware issues here, but it'd help to know if this is an arch issue, or a general tech issue.

meimoo · 2017-07-02 13:51:48

I suppose windows (which came preinstalled on the machine) was working alright with it's uefi boot for almost a year now. I also had arch installed without uefi grub. I was thinking that's probably where I went wrong with this installation; the uefi configuration was that the only thing I could think that I did differently from this and the last installation.

meimoo · 2017-07-03 08:06:20

Sooo I tried updating the firmware for the bios to the latest one offered from dell (1.4.17 last uploaded May 2017), and then messed around with some of the settings in the bios menu. Now when I try to boot arch, instead of getting dumped into emergency mode, I hit the gnome "Oh no! Something has gone wrong" page. Is this better or worse? Haha. Can I recover from this page?

Trilby · 2017-07-03 09:50:36

Definitely better. The disk is recognized. That is a common and completely useless message from gnome. Boot into mutli-user target or switch to another tty to start checking logs. But that is definitely a separate problem and should probably be a new thread.

meimoo · 2017-07-03 10:03:54

I'm still having some problems with the efi and the bios boot structure. For some reason, now there are two labels in the boot menu for arch - the SSD name and the name of the installation, arch. When I boot from standard bios without uefi on the SSD name, it'll pull up the gnome error, but the other arch option claims not to boot. If I try to boot with uefi, I get the same error where it can't recognize the disk at all. Furthermore, it can't boot any live usb; uefi or not. The USB doesn't come up at all in the uefi boot menu anymore and in the standard bios menu, when you try to boot the USB, it will just error that it couldn't boot and you can press any key to reboot. I can't use another tty to check logs if a USB will not boot. Is there some kind of firmware configuration that I might be missing? Or should I dd my USB with some different settings?

meimoo · 2017-07-05 05:54:29

After downgrading the BIOS firmware twice and reformatting the USB to MBR instead of GPT, I could boot with the USB and then fix the gnome thing. Everything is working now, thank you!

Arch Linux

#1 2017-07-01 08:48:26

[SOLVED] Cant mount installation disk when rebooting from hibernation

#2 2017-07-01 12:16:20

Re: [SOLVED] Cant mount installation disk when rebooting from hibernation

#3 2017-07-01 18:43:33

Re: [SOLVED] Cant mount installation disk when rebooting from hibernation

#4 2017-07-01 18:47:47

Re: [SOLVED] Cant mount installation disk when rebooting from hibernation

#5 2017-07-01 18:52:20

Re: [SOLVED] Cant mount installation disk when rebooting from hibernation

#6 2017-07-01 18:57:53

Re: [SOLVED] Cant mount installation disk when rebooting from hibernation

#7 2017-07-01 19:05:17

Re: [SOLVED] Cant mount installation disk when rebooting from hibernation

#8 2017-07-01 19:15:52

Re: [SOLVED] Cant mount installation disk when rebooting from hibernation

#9 2017-07-01 19:20:35

Re: [SOLVED] Cant mount installation disk when rebooting from hibernation

#10 2017-07-02 02:14:24

Re: [SOLVED] Cant mount installation disk when rebooting from hibernation

#11 2017-07-02 03:47:53

Re: [SOLVED] Cant mount installation disk when rebooting from hibernation

#12 2017-07-02 04:11:25

Re: [SOLVED] Cant mount installation disk when rebooting from hibernation

#13 2017-07-02 13:15:20

Re: [SOLVED] Cant mount installation disk when rebooting from hibernation

#14 2017-07-02 13:46:34

Re: [SOLVED] Cant mount installation disk when rebooting from hibernation

#15 2017-07-02 13:51:48

Re: [SOLVED] Cant mount installation disk when rebooting from hibernation

#16 2017-07-03 08:06:20

Re: [SOLVED] Cant mount installation disk when rebooting from hibernation

#17 2017-07-03 09:50:36

Re: [SOLVED] Cant mount installation disk when rebooting from hibernation

#18 2017-07-03 10:03:54

Re: [SOLVED] Cant mount installation disk when rebooting from hibernation

#19 2017-07-05 05:54:29

Re: [SOLVED] Cant mount installation disk when rebooting from hibernation

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