I posted this question on ask Fedora ( http://ask.fedoraproject.org/question/2612/fedora-fails-to-boot-with-systemd...), but didn't get any answer so I'm asking here also.
My computer is in a totally useless state, as I can not boot at all. What I did was I tried to join my root, boot and home partitions into one. I copied the files, updated the grub config and /etc/fstab and recreated the initramfs, all this from a live Fedora environment. Now I can't boot, instead the system hangs at an endless loop printing something like (typing it here from memory) "[FAILED] can't start systemd journal service" over and over again.
What can I do to fix my system?
Daniel Landau
On Sun, 2012-10-07 at 12:21 +0300, Daniel Landau wrote:
What I did was I tried to join my root, boot and home partitions into one.
Not really a good idea, but most particularly not keeping boot separate. Nothing wrong with the other stuff being on one partition, you just need to make the change carefully.
I copied the files, updated the grub config and /etc/fstab and recreated the initramfs, all this from a live Fedora environment.
I think you're going to go into much more explicit detail about what you did before anyone can give you accurate help.
On Sun, Oct 07, 2012 at 12:17:22PM +0100, Frank Murphy wrote:
On 07/10/12 10:21, Daniel Landau wrote:
What can I do to fix my system?
Reinstall, and then leave things alone.
That's really not a very friendly suggestion. Traditionally, Linux-based operating systems are fun to work with because you can mess around and when you break things, you can find what went wrong, you can usually find a good reason and even if you can't repair it, you can understand exactly what you screwed up.
So, how can Daniel find exactly what is making this system fail to boot? Will it be logged somewhere even though journald is failing to start? Is there a way to turn on more helpful debugging output?
On 07/10/12 14:22, Matthew Miller wrote:
On Sun, Oct 07, 2012 at 12:17:22PM +0100, Frank Murphy wrote:
On 07/10/12 10:21, Daniel Landau wrote:
What can I do to fix my system?
Reinstall, and then leave things alone.
That's really not a very friendly suggestion. Traditionally, Linux-based operating systems are fun to work with because you can mess around and when you break things, you can find what went wrong,
Disagree, Linux systems are fuctional beasts (in a good way) But play with them at your peril, just like any other OS.
you can usually find a good
reason and even if you can't repair it, you can understand exactly what you screwed up.
If whoever can't fix it, you shouldn't really be encourageing breakage
So, how can Daniel find exactly what is making this system fail to boot?
Thats' known already, he moved stuff, and libs\configs etc, are now in a maze.
Will it be logged somewhere even though journald is failing to start?
Probably not if journald is sweeping.
Is
there a way to turn on more helpful debugging output?
Yes, reinstall
On 07/10/12 10:21, Daniel Landau wrote:
I posted this question on ask Fedora (http://ask.fedoraproject.org/question/2612/fedora-fails-to-boot-with-systemd...), but didn't get any answer so I'm asking here also.
My computer is in a totally useless state, as I can not boot at all. What I did was I tried to join my root, boot and home partitions into one.
Explain what is the name of the One?
Hi all,
On Sun, Oct 7, 2012 at 12:30 PM, Joe Zeff joe@zeff.us wrote:
Did you back up anything before starting?
Not really, no, but doing it now.
On Sun, Oct 7, 2012 at 10:17 AM, Frank Murphy frankly3d@gmail.com wrote:
On 07/10/12 10:21, Daniel Landau wrote:
My computer is in a totally useless state, as I can not boot at all. What I did was I tried to join my root, boot and home partitions into one.
Explain what is the name of the One?
Not really sure what you mean by this. It's name is /dev/sda5 perhaps?
On Sun, Oct 7, 2012 at 10:01 AM, Frank Murphy frankly3d@gmail.com wrote:
On 07/10/12 14:22, Matthew Miller wrote:
So, how can Daniel find exactly what is making this system fail to boot?
Thats' known already, he moved stuff, and libs\configs etc, are now in a maze.
Why should libs and configs care about the partitions as long as everything is mounted correctly?
Is there a way to turn on more helpful debugging output?
Yes, reinstall
That's not really helpful.
On Sun, Oct 7, 2012 at 7:14 AM, Tim ignored_mailbox@yahoo.com.au wrote:
On Sun, 2012-10-07 at 12:21 +0300, Daniel Landau wrote:
What I did was I tried to join my root, boot and home partitions into one.
Not really a good idea, but most particularly not keeping boot separate. Nothing wrong with the other stuff being on one partition, you just need to make the change carefully.
There's no reason why you couldn't keep everything on one partition. One possible reason could be having an ext2 boot partition and something more exciting for the rest, but I don't think my problem is with booting off ext4.
I copied the files, updated the grub config and /etc/fstab and recreated the initramfs, all this from a live Fedora environment.
I think you're going to go into much more explicit detail about what you did before anyone can give you accurate help.
Ok, what I did step by step:
1. Boot into a live Fedora environment. 2. Mount all the partitions that the Fedora installer created for me, i.e. boot, root and home 3. The home partitions was in the place I wanted it, and the correct size so I chose it to be my new all-in-one partition. 4. I created a new directory home in my partition and moved the user's home directories there 5. I copied everything from my root partition (except for the empty home dir) to the all-in-one partition. I figured this should be fine, since it wasn't running, so no dirt in proc. I'm not really sure about whether I should have omitted something, because I'm not such an expert. 6. In the previous step, an empty boot directory got transferred into the partition, so I just copied the contents of the boot partition there. 7. At this stage, the grub config was all wrong, so I updated it with grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg. It found the Fedora install and seemed to be by all accounts fine. 8. I updated /etc/fstab from having mounts with different UUIDs to having just /dev/sda5 at root (/), because that's what I have now. 9. Some googling/duckduckgoing led me to believe, that systemd-journald has something to do with the initramfs, mainly starting there. I don't really know what this means. The link is here: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=835867. Also this step didn't have any effect as far as I can tell.
And that's where I'm now. Some help would be appreciated.
Daniel Landau
On 10/07/2012 05:21 AM, Daniel Landau wrote:
I posted this question on ask Fedora (http://ask.fedoraproject.org/question/2612/fedora-fails-to-boot-with-systemd...), but didn't get any answer so I'm asking here also.
My computer is in a totally useless state, as I can not boot at all. What I did was I tried to join my root, boot and home partitions into one. I copied the files, updated the grub config and /etc/fstab and recreated the initramfs, all this from a live Fedora environment. Now I can't boot, instead the system hangs at an endless loop printing something like (typing it here from memory) "[FAILED] can't start systemd journal service" over and over again.
What can I do to fix my system?
Daniel Landau
To me?...since I'm not that proficient with all the "tricks of the trade" as most people here are, sounds like a complete and utter re-installation of the OS. It's the only way I could see getting everything back where it belongs......of course I'm sure one of these Gurus will have a proven, sure-fire method of getting this to work, and I'm very interested in hearing and reading about them, to add to my "tips & tricks" collection....but as far as I'm concerned I would just re-install from scratch and know to NOT do whatever it is you did in the future!
EGO II
On 10/07/2012 09:22 AM, Matthew Miller wrote:
On Sun, Oct 07, 2012 at 12:17:22PM +0100, Frank Murphy wrote:
On 07/10/12 10:21, Daniel Landau wrote:
What can I do to fix my system?
Reinstall, and then leave things alone.
That's really not a very friendly suggestion. Traditionally, Linux-based operating systems are fun to work with because you can mess around and when you break things, you can find what went wrong, you can usually find a good reason and even if you can't repair it, you can understand exactly what you screwed up.
So, how can Daniel find exactly what is making this system fail to boot? Will it be logged somewhere even though journald is failing to start? Is there a way to turn on more helpful debugging output?
I myself cannot think of a way to get journald to start.....unless you're talking "command line" stuff.....maybe there's some switch?...or command that will allow him to get to the point where he can select services that he wants to run upon boot-up? I don't know because I'm still a noobie.....but if I were going to give a "friendly" suggestion it would be something along those lines....I also wouldn't like to be given advice such as that.....but SOMETIMES....it's the ONLY advice that can be given?....as I myself have been told that a time or two.....hmmm....is there somewhere I can go to find command line stuff that would allow me to check / start / stop services upon booting up? Besides the "Man Pages" that I wouldn't be able to access because I wouldn't be able to boot up?....
EGO II
Tim:
Not really a good idea, but most particularly not keeping boot separate. Nothing wrong with the other stuff being on one partition, you just need to make the change carefully.
Daniel Landau:
There's no reason why you couldn't keep everything on one partition. One possible reason could be having an ext2 boot partition and something more exciting for the rest, but I don't think my problem is with booting off ext4.
Everything but boot can easily be in one partition, but there's one very good reason that boot *may* *need* to be in its own partition at the start of the drive: Some BIOSes just can't read far enough into a drive to start booting up. And what may seem to work, at first, may fail later on, as newer files (needed to boot the system) get written further into the drive. Such as when you install new kernels.
So, it (no boot partition) could well be a cause of a failure to boot, though I'm not sure what sort of error message you'll see when that is the problem. I'd expect some sort of file not found error, though.
I like partitioning the installation, so that should a drive error happen, or the system does a check when it thinks there may be one, it's a lot quicker to check a small partition than one huge one. Not to mention that a file screw-up in a non-home partition is far less likely to screw up personal files. And having a separate home partition makes updating a lot easier: You can update a system, and keep personal files in place. My current preference for a minimally partitioned system is boot, /, and home. If I were doing more partitions, or spreading across drive, I like separate var and tmp.
Other people see other advantages to partitioning: Such as different file systems, or mounting options, for different partitions, more optimum to that part of the system.
I have, in the past, moved partitions like you've done. Copied the files to the new location, unmounted the old partition. Generally it worked without any dramas, other than remembering to set permissions correctly on the tmp directory. Sometimes a relabelling may be needed, depending on how you copied/moved things over. But you'd need to be able to boot up, first, for that. Again, you'd get a different kind of error message than you mentioned.
Moving boot requires more than just copying files, and changing pointers. There are bootloaders in the partitions.
How did you do the copying? With a file manager, the command line, done as the root user?
On 10/07/2012 05:07 PM, Tim wrote:
Tim:
Not really a good idea, but most particularly not keeping boot separate. Nothing wrong with the other stuff being on one partition, you just need to make the change carefully.
Daniel Landau:
There's no reason why you couldn't keep everything on one partition. One possible reason could be having an ext2 boot partition and something more exciting for the rest, but I don't think my problem is with booting off ext4.
Everything but boot can easily be in one partition, but there's one very good reason that boot *may* *need* to be in its own partition at the start of the drive: Some BIOSes just can't read far enough into a drive to start booting up. And what may seem to work, at first, may fail later on, as newer files (needed to boot the system) get written further into the drive. Such as when you install new kernels.
So, it (no boot partition) could well be a cause of a failure to boot, though I'm not sure what sort of error message you'll see when that is the problem. I'd expect some sort of file not found error, though.
I like partitioning the installation, so that should a drive error happen, or the system does a check when it thinks there may be one, it's a lot quicker to check a small partition than one huge one. Not to mention that a file screw-up in a non-home partition is far less likely to screw up personal files. And having a separate home partition makes updating a lot easier: You can update a system, and keep personal files in place. My current preference for a minimally partitioned system is boot, /, and home. If I were doing more partitions, or spreading across drive, I like separate var and tmp.
Other people see other advantages to partitioning: Such as different file systems, or mounting options, for different partitions, more optimum to that part of the system.
I have, in the past, moved partitions like you've done. Copied the files to the new location, unmounted the old partition. Generally it worked without any dramas, other than remembering to set permissions correctly on the tmp directory. Sometimes a relabelling may be needed, depending on how you copied/moved things over. But you'd need to be able to boot up, first, for that. Again, you'd get a different kind of error message than you mentioned.
Moving boot requires more than just copying files, and changing pointers. There are bootloaders in the partitions.
How did you do the copying? With a file manager, the command line, done as the root user?
Am I to assume that the installer WON'T do that for you? I've noticed there's a 524MB "partition" on my 160GB hard drive, that just says "Filesystem Partition 2 Ext4"......might this be where my root, home and bootloading files are? I certainly don't remember creating this partition...so where'd it come from? Just curious....as I do a backup of everything on this drive to prevent something like this from happening to me!....
EGO II
On 8 Oct 2012 00:07, "Tim" ignored_mailbox@yahoo.com.au wrote:
Tim:
Not really a good idea, but most particularly not keeping boot separate. Nothing wrong with the other stuff being on one partition, you just need to make the change carefully.
Daniel Landau:
There's no reason why you couldn't keep everything on one partition. One possible reason could be having an ext2 boot partition and something more exciting for the rest, but I don't think my problem is with booting off ext4.
Everything but boot can easily be in one partition, but there's one very good reason that boot *may* *need* to be in its own partition at the start of the drive: Some BIOSes just can't read far enough into a drive to start booting up. And what may seem to work, at first, may fail later on, as newer files (needed to boot the system) get written further into the drive. Such as when you install new kernels.
So, it (no boot partition) could well be a cause of a failure to boot, though I'm not sure what sort of error message you'll see when that is the problem. I'd expect some sort of file not found error, though.
I like partitioning the installation, so that should a drive error happen, or the system does a check when it thinks there may be one, it's a lot quicker to check a small partition than one huge one. Not to mention that a file screw-up in a non-home partition is far less likely to screw up personal files. And having a separate home partition makes updating a lot easier: You can update a system, and keep personal files in place. My current preference for a minimally partitioned system is boot, /, and home. If I were doing more partitions, or spreading across drive, I like separate var and tmp.
Other people see other advantages to partitioning: Such as different file systems, or mounting options, for different partitions, more optimum to that part of the system.
Thank you for your thought out answer. I did know about some of the issues, but learned also new stuff, e.g. the bios thing was new to me.
I have, in the past, moved partitions like you've done. Copied the files to the new location, unmounted the old partition. Generally it worked without any dramas, other than remembering to set permissions correctly on the tmp directory. Sometimes a relabelling may be needed, depending on how you copied/moved things over. But you'd need to be able to boot up, first, for that. Again, you'd get a different kind of error message than you mentioned.
Moving boot requires more than just copying files, and changing pointers. There are bootloaders in the partitions.
I did update the grub config and reinstall it to the MBR.
How did you do the copying? With a file manager, the command line, done as the root user?
I did a "cp -a" as the root of a Fedora live USB boot.
Daniel Landau
On 10/07/2012 02:07 PM, Tim wrote:
Other people see other advantages to partitioning: Such as different file systems, or mounting options, for different partitions, more optimum to that part of the system.
One advantage of a separate /home is the ability to re-install without losing any of your personal files. Not that I'd ever do that, mind you, without backing it up first, of course.
On 07/10/12 18:20, Daniel Landau wrote:
Explain what is the name of the One?
Not really sure what you mean by this. It's name is /dev/sda5 perhaps?
sudo blkid will give you uuids to match your partition(s).
Yes, reinstall
That's not really helpful.
It is actually. Then when ready to do the move. Ask how it can be done safely.
And that's where I'm now. Some help would be appreciated.
Ask before you commit. A lesson hard learned.
On Sun, 2012-10-07 at 16:08 -0700, Joe Zeff wrote:
One advantage of a separate /home is the ability to re-install without losing any of your personal files.
As I'd mentioned, though I did call it updating, it's down to the same process - running the installer.
Not that I'd ever do that, mind you, without backing it up first, of course.
Likewise, but you only have to do the backup, not a backup and a reinstall. So you save half the time.
-
Daniel Landau -
EGO-II.1 -
Frank Murphy -
Joe Zeff -
Matthew Miller -
Tim