Device not booting up after disabling the HDD

[SearingSunrazeSmash]

After closely thinking up all the processes and ideas I got from your answer and @flyingcakes answer in that topic, now I feel that there might be some relation b/w the conflicts happening for booting sequence b/w HDD and SSD…

So, will following this procedure can cause the same confusion for GRUB ?

[pebcak]

Please study the following ArchWiki article:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Fstab

@SearingSunrazeSmash

So, will following this procedure can cause the same confusion for GRUB ?

No, not for Grub.
If it is done properly, your system should boot normally and your devices all mounted at mount points that you have defined in /etc/fstab.

The reason it failed before was that the system was trying to mount partitions in fstab which no longer were existent and eventually dropped to emergency shell.

[SearingSunrazeSmash]

But I remember @dalto had suggested this :

Still I faced conflicts for booting sequence ?

[pebcak]

@SearingSunrazeSmash

Still I faced conflicts for booting sequence ?

As I understand, that is the subjec of this thread:

Device now tries to boot from different partitions of grubless partitions

Hello Everyone. Few days ago, I had made a similar thread : Though, at that moment the idea fixed the issue, but now device tries to boot from different partitions of HDD. Now, the thing had got strange lately. Since my root partition is on sdb1 and HDD is labelled as sda1, but at current boot, they are labelled as sdc1 and sdd1. And this happened when device tried to boot up first from Grub-less sda1. After reboot, label becomes normal. I tried to save the logs of emergency mode, but i…

which seems to be solved now. I’m afraid I can’t be of any help on that one.

And the nofail options is exactly intended for the cases as per explanation you posted.

No need really for it for partitions on internal drives.

[SearingSunrazeSmash]

Should I use this ?

The nofail option is best combined with the x-systemd.device-timeout option.

[pebcak]

You don’t need nofail for partitions on internal drives.

[SearingSunrazeSmash]

Okay…

Now this is new and exciting position where I am.
Also,

Thank you very much so far here, because of you I learned many things like how to use emergency mode and fix the booting conflicts.

[pebcak]

You have everything you need to know in the Wiki article plus you have done it once before as in the solution in the other thread. Just adapt it to the new "circumstances.

In case of doubt, post here.
I have to go off the forum for a while but I’m sure others would reach out to you.

Good Luck!

[SearingSunrazeSmash]

Today morning, I disabled HDD from BIOS so that there should be no chance of conflicts while booting, but now system is not booting nor it is going into emergency mode…

Also, now that HDD is vanished frim BIOS as well.
How should I proceed?

[SearingSunrazeSmash]

Somehow, system booted up, but boot up speed is very slow and only wallpaper was displayed for couple of minutes.

Also, system was on full CPU usage at boot.

Why this is happening ??

[flyingcakes]

Did you mess some other option in BIOS?

[SearingSunrazeSmash]

How should I find it out ?

[flyingcakes]

Only you can tell

[SearingSunrazeSmash]

I only disabled HDD and enabled ssd for booting.

I will share its image in 2 minutes.

[SearingSunrazeSmash]

@flyingcakes

Here it is :

[SearingSunrazeSmash]

One more thing is that name of drives had changed.

┬─[deweshk@HomeDesktop:~]─[10:47:08 AM IST]
╰─>$ lsblk -a
NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda      8:0    1     0B  0 disk 
sdb      8:16   1     0B  0 disk 
sdc      8:32   0 465.8G  0 disk 
├─sdc1   8:33   0  97.6G  0 part /mnt/sda1
├─sdc2   8:34   0 122.7G  0 part /mnt/sda2
├─sdc3   8:35   0     1K  0 part 
├─sdc5   8:37   0 122.7G  0 part /mnt/sda5
└─sdc6   8:38   0 122.7G  0 part /mnt/sda6
sdd      8:48   0 111.8G  0 disk 
└─sdd1   8:49   0 111.8G  0 part /
zram0  254:0    0 906.3M  0 disk [SWAP]
zram1  254:1    0 271.9M  0 disk /run/compressed-mount-point

As we can see, sdb is replaced with sdd and sda is replaced with sdc...

[SearingSunrazeSmash]

Here are few logs :

1. journalctl -xb = https://clbin.com/PB8GJ
2. journalctl -b -0 = https://clbin.com/KFDVx

Also, SMART status is unavailable for all devices since today morning.

[Pudge]

@SearingSunrazeSmash

One more thing is that name of drives had changed.
As we can see, sdb is replaced with sdd and sda is replaced with sdc…

In a terminal, do

cat /etc/fstab

If in fstab your storage devices are listed like this:

UUID=EE77-FB78                            /boot/efi      vfat    umask=0077 0 2
UUID=30d228cd-0eae-4315-9308-0e1f24a31178 /              ext4    defaults,noatime 0 1
UUID=0f4597ec-f2cf-4a3a-9ce4-2081f1427233 swap           swap    defaults,noatime 0 0

then it does not matter that the storage device labels have changed. In fact, that is why they came up with UUIDs for storage devices in the first place.

If your storage devices are listed like this,

/dev/sda1   /boot/efi      vfat    umask=0077 0 2
/dev/sda2   /              ext4    defaults,noatime 0 1

then you should change the storage device labels to storage device UUIDs.

I think the EnOS liveISO has always used UUIDs during install, so I expect to see fstab to be using UUIDs.

Pudge

[SearingSunrazeSmash]

@Pudge

In a terminal, do

cat /etc/fstab

┬─[deweshk@HomeDesktop:~]─[09:17:45 AM IST]
╰─>$ cat /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=a4f552a4-21c8-4da3-932a-f72d289bfde6 /              ext4    defaults,noatime 0 1
tmpfs                                     /tmp           tmpfs   defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0

As of now, I removed the entries of HDD’s partitions as from last few days, during boot process I am getting errors like failed to mount /dev/sda(1)(2)(5)(6) or system trying to boot from this drive.

---

But sir, I am confused from the situation in which device is trying to boot from HDD despite the fact that OS and root is on SSD.

---

Also, what is the importance of /tmp and tmpfs ? And why it is set at
,noatime,mode=1777 0 0 ? I remember that on Wiki somewhere it is written that setting the value to 0 0 means infinite time loop.

[Stagger_Lee]

@SearingSunrazeSmash

what is the importance of /tmp and tmpfs ?

See the Arch wiki here:

tmpfs is a temporary filesystem that resides in memory and/or swap partition(s). Mounting directories as tmpfs can be an effective way of speeding up accesses to their files, or to ensure that their contents are automatically cleared upon reboot.

Also, see here (Wikipedia).

@SearingSunrazeSmash

And why it is set at
,noatime,mode=1777 0 0 ? I remember that on Wiki somewhere it is written that setting the value to 0 0 means infinite time loop.

I don’t know what an “infinite time loop” means, but those 2 fields are for dump and fsck. See here:

• <dump> is checked by the dump(8) utility. This field is usually set to 0, which disables the check.
• <fsck> sets the order for file system checks at boot time; see fsck(8). For the root device it should be 1. For other partitions it should be 2, or 0 to disable checking.

Note that with an Arch-based distro you don’t need an entry for /tmp in fstab:
(systemd places /tmp on tmpfs by default, so any distro that uses systemd does this unless specifically overriden)

Arch uses a tmpfs /run directory, with /var/run and /var/lock simply existing as symlinks for compatibility. It is also used for /tmp by the default systemd setup and does not require an entry in fstab unless a specific configuration is needed.

I don’t have /tmp in my fstab, yet I have /tmp mounted:

Stagger_Lee:findmnt /tmp
TARGET SOURCE FSTYPE OPTIONS
/tmp   tmpfs  tmpfs  rw,nosuid,nodev,nr_inodes=1048576,inode64