Alright I’m at the end of the rope with my Linux knowledge. So I need your help.
I’m on EndeavourOS and just recently upgraded to Linux 7.1.5, all upgrades thus far have been without issue. I am dual-booting but have Linux on its own SSD, and grub handles booting into Linux or Windows.
Now, after booting into Windows and back into Linux, Linux won’t start.
The error:
A start job is running for /dev/disks/by-uuid/<CORRECT UUID>
Let me tell you what I’ve already done:
- Regenerate mkinitrd with dracut
- Regenerate grub.cfg and verified via diff it is identical to the current one
- On a live usb verified that the UUIDs in the grub and fstab files are correct using the KDE partition manager (they are)
- Verify on a live usb the SSD still works (data and everything is still there)
- Changed the grub boot option on boot to check that the UUID is not hardcoded somewhere and can be changed (this is true, inputting a garbage UUID changes the boot error to A start job is running for /dev/disks/by-uuid/garbage-uuid
One last idea I had was to drop myself into the dracut emergency shell and actually check what’s actually under /dev/disks/by-uuid and lo and behold: it’s actually missing the drive.
Here’s whats nuts tho: grub loads the drive by UUID as well, loads the initrd, and all that works. When I regenerated the initrd with dracut I could also tell that grub was now loading the newer initrd.
WHAT THE FUCK???
Help?
At this point I REALLY don’t know wtf to do. Why doesnt the initramfs detect the drive? The only useful info I can add here is that all drives listed under /dev/disks/by-uuid had that shorter UUID with no dashes like ABCD1234, whereas the UUID for the correct drive/partition is the longer type UUID like abc1234-1234-0000-defg
Update: I’m giving up. I tried every solution I could find. Tried the LTS kernel, fucking around with dracut options. I don’t know what the issue is or how to fix it.
I’ll be backing up my shit now and will move back to windows until I can find the brain power necessary for a reinstall.
Don’t know yet if I’ll stick to EndeavourOS or try nix or something, EOS worked out of the box with my NVIDIA card.
I want to thank everyone for your support. I would not have guessed for this issue to be so deep that it couldn’t be fixed, it is what it is I guess.
If you do switch back to Linux I’ll note that Endeavour and other Arch forks have moved away from older NVIDIA cards because NVIDIA stopped supporting open source drivers. There’s community-maintained solutions out there though. I forget exactly how old, but my 1080 got the boot, and then I had to gety Grover’s from AUR for a bit, right before that security breach. That contributed to my decision to upgrade to a new AMD card.
Just install a distro that doesn’t fail like that by overwriting system files on a whim. You’re saying that you’re going from an arch based system (which are prone to get weird errors every few weeks), to NixOS, which has at the very least a steep learning curve. My assessment is that you are asking for trouble yourself. I know that Debian-stable sounds boring, but it never breaks like that. If you’re truly burnt out as you say, you would go with the safe, unglamorous solution. I used to tinker with Linux all the time (I started on slackware in 1998), now I just run Mint on laptops, and Debian on my PCs. I just don’t want bad surprises anymore, I’m at an age that the OS needs to work as expected.
Thing is every time I read about Nix I get a bit excited about it and I just read smth about it before posting this. Tho I do have bad experience with breaking a franken debian install once way back when :D
I’ll obvs do research and maybe some distro hopping before deciding on the next thing, but imma chill for a while now. Specially cause I slept kinda bad because my brain kept trying to fix the distro in bed ><
That suicide did a number on me
Hey I encountered a similar issue. The boot drive switched from mounting to /efi/ to /boot/ on the off chance that this may be causing the same issue for you check fstabs and you kernel cmdline
Thanks but I’m not gonna try that out now. Just finished backing everything up and am kinda burnt out now trying to fix this issue. Honestly I’d rather just to a full reinstall.