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/
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
Its not the fstab, I mean what am I gonna do, not mount the root drive? idk if its windows fastboot but this setup has been working for a couple months and survived windows and linux updates so this seems unlikely
No I realize that, for me it was stuck on a windows partition , which was irrelevant to Linux running. It sounds like it found some corruption and wants to do a full disk check. Or maybe their is a hardware fault arising.
Others may have better answers for you.
Are your windows drives mounted in linux? If so comment them out in fstab or nofail them as a minimum, although it wouldn't normally manifest as a root drive error (unless you've set up a strange mount point for the windows drives outside /mnt on root or even in home folder? or do you have them listed above your root drive in fstab so they are trying to mount first and that fails?).
Also you said elsewhere your linux drives can be "seen" in windows. Just to be clear, you've not mounted the drives in Windows right using a tool like Ext2Fsd? Because if so, go into windows and unmount the drive.
And have you disabled fastboot? Not just rebooted but disabled fastboot completely?
Yes, I mount my NTFS drives in linux, and they're all nofail already, it's literally the root drive it can't find which makes no sense.
No, I don't mount my linux drive on windows, I am not insane :D
Just checked, fast startup is disabled