Arch Linux

Salkay

Member

Registered: 2014-05-22

Posts: 619

System always goes into emergency mode after reboot

I recently bought a Dell Optiplex 7060 as a home server, which is now happily running Arch (my eighth Arch system!). However, when I reboot the system, it always boots into emergency mode. journalctl has the following information

Mar 27 21:50:06 hostname systemd[1]: dev-disk-by\x2duuid-<redacted>.device: Job dev-disk-by\x2duuid-433fc1e>
Mar 27 21:50:06 hostname systemd[1]: Timed out waiting for device /dev/disk/by-uuid/<redacted>.
Mar 27 21:50:06 hostname systemd[1]: Dependency failed for /media/<redacted>.
Mar 27 21:50:06 hostname systemd[1]: Dependency failed for Local File Systems.

I have four USB drives connected, all listed in /etc/fstab. I want these mounted during boot, otherwise it should abort (so this works fine).

Oddly enough, if I then force a shutdown with the power button, then turn the system on again, it always boots fine. Hence on reboot it always fails, but on a cold boot it always works.

I've only just started recording the UUID in the journal, so I'm not sure if it's always the same hard drive. The last two three failures were for the same drive, but the SMART details suggest it's fine, so it's unclear if it's a hardware failure. I also never had this failures when using the same hard drives on my old Raspberry Pi (running Arch ARM).

I wondered if it was something to do with the system requiring a longer wait before the hard drive spins up? Perhaps it takes longer for the drive to spin back up if it's just spun down (i.e. after a reboot)?

Last edited by Salkay (2024-03-29 23:54:05)

Lone_Wolf

Forum Moderator

From: Netherlands, Europe

Registered: 2005-10-04

Posts: 11,961

Re: System always goes into emergency mode after reboot

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Power_ … utosuspend could be causing this.

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Disliking systemd intensely, but not satisfied with alternatives so focusing on taming systemd.

(A works at time B)  && (time C > time B ) ≠  (A works at time C)

Salkay

Member

Registered: 2014-05-22

Posts: 619

Re: System always goes into emergency mode after reboot

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Power_ … utosuspend could be causing this.

Thanks @Lone_Wolf. That seems plausible.

I certainly don't want to disable autosuspend of my disks. I thought maybe the problem was that on boot, fstab wasn't waiting long enough for disks to come online, but it seems the default timeout is 90 seconds. This should be plenty of time. So perhaps the disks are autosuspending, the reboot isn't properly "resetting" the suspend state of the disk, and it's stuck in suspend mode after reboot.

Maybe I could make the disks spin up before the power down. Seems crazy, but might work.

EDIT: I manually spun the disks up before rebooting, but I had the same issue as above. In the meantime, I've set the system to automatically reboot after a timeout in emergency mode, which seems to work. The first reboot seems to fail, then the second works.

Last edited by Salkay (2024-03-29 23:52:56)