Can't boot anymore (systemd)

[anon74621442]

Yesterday everything worked just fine, but today I tried to turn my computer on, and I got this error:

Apparently /new_root can’t be found (whatever that means).

I haven’t made any changes to systemd.

I am however able to boot into fallback initramfs image.

I tried reinstalling systemd there, and then running these 2 commands:

sudo grub-install --no-nvram
sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

This is the output of /etc/fstab:

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a device; this may
# be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices that works even if
# disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system>             <mount point>  <type>  <options>  <dump>  <pass>
UUID=00A8-B34B                            /boot/efi      vfat    defaults,noatime 0 2
UUID=70436173-70dc-4a8d-9f48-dac9a5c6a204 /              ext4    defaults,noatime 0 1
/dev/disk/by-label/ExternalHDD /mnt/ExternalHDD auto nosuid,nodev,nofail,x-gvfs-show 0 0

However that hadn’t helped as well.
Please help

[pebcak]

@anon74621442

I am however able to boot into fallback initramfs image.

Boot into your system and rebuild your initramfs for all the installed kernels.

If using mkinitcpio: sudo mkinitcpio -P

If using dracut: sudo dracut-rebuild

Let’s see if this would work out!

[anon74621442]

@pebcak

sudo mkinitcpio -P

That has worked! Thank you so much!!!

[pebcak]

You are welcome! Glad you got it working!

[anon74621442]

Is there a reason it stopped working over night? How can I figure out the cause?

[pebcak]

Oftentimes it occurs when an update is interrupted in its course and the kernel images won’t be rebuild correctly. In your case It’s difficult to say.
Might be that other forum members know of other causes. I am curious too.

[petsam]

@anon74621442

How can I figure out the cause?

@pebcak

when an update is interrupted in its course and the kernel images won’t be rebuild correctly

Check your pacman.log for a failed kernel building, although I doubt it is the problem. AFAIK the fallback image is built after the normal one, and you say fallback was successful.

OTOH, the boot message says that the root partition was not found.
A possible explanation might be a temporary disk discovery failure, while after reboot it was found. If you had tried the normal kernel again, you might have had a different result .

Random or temporary disk discovery failure at boot is a possible sign of a slowly failing disk, but not always (BIOS firmware might be another reason). Nevertheless, ensuring backup of your important files (including custom configuration system files) is a good idea. After this, maybe checking the disk status (SMART and/or fsck) .