Multiple partitions with the same uuid

Hi all, my system crashed during an update and now it won’t boot. Checking the survey I have two partitions with the same uuid which I didn’t thing should happen. One is a very small partition at the beginning of the drive. Any suggestions on what I should do next would be appreciated.

Btw the troublesome partition is also reporting a bad superblock

checked it already?
what is the filesystem?

logs :wink:

lsblk -f

Currently running fsck on the root partition /dev/sda1,
lsblk -f shows:

sda                                                                                                              
├─sda1 ext4     1.0              ROOT                        e4178c27-68b7-4d18-bbd0-5652b85c1c71                
├─sda2 ext4     1.0              HOME                        09e4086e-7d63-4a24-9427-ee050db97f4b                
├─sda3 swap     1                                            dd17c91c-af3a-447e-b43b-1c7f3216f1a5                
└─sda4 ext4     1.0              ROOT                        e4178c27-68b7-4d18-bbd0-5652b85c1c71

Do they also have the same partitionid?

lsblk -o name,type,fstype,size,mountpoint,uuid,partuuid
sda    disk            1.8T                                                            
├─sda1 part ext4     923.5G                       e4178c27-68b7-4d18-bbd0-5652b85c1c71 3ea90729-01
├─sda2 part ext4     931.5G                       09e4086e-7d63-4a24-9427-ee050db97f4b 3ea90729-02
├─sda3 part swap         8G                       dd17c91c-af3a-447e-b43b-1c7f3216f1a5 3ea90729-03
└─sda4 part ext4        10M                       e4178c27-68b7-4d18-bbd0-5652b85c1c71 3ea90729-04

That looks like corruption to me.

UUIDs can be duplicated but they are stored in the superblock so if that is damaged, it seems bad. That new partition has the same label and uuid as the original.

looks corrupt to me too. I’m trying to just get it working again so I can get the time to fix it properly, which likely means replacing the HD, but I won’t have actual physical access to the computer for some time so I’m trying to get working for now.

Edit /etc/fstab and tell it to mount that partition by something other than UUID.

i.e. replace UUID=e4178c27-68b7-4d18-bbd0-5652b85c1c71 with /dev/sda1

You might have to change the grub config as well.

Thanks I’ll give that a try next. Hopefully I can get this working until I can get access to the machine to properly fix it which I’m assuming is a new drive and rebuilding it. Unless anyone has any additional tricks I could try?

what @dalto said looks like a secure solution to me too :wink: as it does not touch the partitions and only change config.
As if you p.e. would go to remove this wrong 10M partition it could cause dataloss

Thank you @dalto and @joekamprad I got the computer up and running again! I know its temporary fix until I can get to it physically and deal with the HD, but for now it’s running again :slightly_smiling_face:

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This has raised a question in my so called brain.
If you use dd to copy an entire partition to a new device, does the target device have the same partition UUID as the source? In other words, is the UUID copied over with the data?

Pudge

It should be copied, yes.

@pudge, I just re-read what you wrote more closely. My answer isn’t quite right.

If you copy an entire disk with dd the UUIDs should come over. If you only copy a partition, I don’t believe that will happen.

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