Problem Description:
I am new to Linux and have been using Ubuntu for several months. The day before yesterday, the PC froze and I shut it down as I had a couple times before. I suspect now that this may have been a dirty shutdown and may have caused this problem, if it’s not whatever caused the freeze in the first place (still unknown, though possibly a drive starting to fail).
At first it was booting into emergency mode and after some detective work, I removed a duplicate drive entry from the fstab. From there, it no longer booted into emergency mode.
Now, I am at a place where it boots up, the loading icon spins, the screen flashes black and then it freezes on the motherboard (MSI) and Ubuntu logo screen. After a lot more troubleshooting and getting no where, I discovered the PC is actually running. I have a web server and some docker apps and I can access those without issue. However, I cannot RDC or ssh into the PC as I get “connection refused”.
I checked the journalctl -b log but I just don’t see anything that stands out as an error (though I am a newbie). It even says “startup finished in 23 seconds” and appears like it doesn’t see anything wrong with startup. At this point, I do not even know what else to look into to try to figure out what is wrong. Any help is greatly appreciated!
Relevant System Information:
Integrated graphics only. Boot drive is an SDD NVME and I have 4 HDD data drives attached through SATA.
Screenshots or Error Messages:
I can’t do a screenshot because I can’t figure out how to transfer pictures without actual access to the PC, but this screenshot isn’t really that informative anyways.
In the boot-repair report, lines 245 - 249 refer to your HDDs
Via a “Try Ubuntu” live session, put a comment # at the beginning of each line so that the disks are temporarily ignored during start up.
Only ESP, system and swap should be active
Yesterday I tried commenting out the drives by editing the fstab. It did not make any improvements in the boot process. Could you give a little more explanation on how I would attempt this with a try ubuntu live session? I couldn’t figure out how to access anything to edit.
You have to mount your / partition from the live installer.
Then drill down to /etc/fstab and open that for editing.sudoedit: /media/fred/noble-ssk/etc/fstab: editing files in a writable directory is not permitted
This worked for me to see my full install of noble on my ssk external drive. But sudoedit in terminal gave an error. I use Kubuntu & Dophin browser lets me open it and edit it. Usually file browser will not edit files owned by root.
Do not use device like /dev/sda1 to mount drives. Drive order sda, sdb etc is determined by UEFI/BIOS and how fast each drive is seen by system. Use UUID or label.
sudoedit: /media/fred/noble-ssk/etc/fstab: editing files in a writable directory is not permitted
I appreciate your help. How would I go about mounting the / partition in the live installer? I figured this part out
After that, I should basically rewrite the fstab to use the UUIDs instead? Would that be causing the current problem? To my knowledge, it must have always been this way so I wonder why it would suddenly be an issue. I did not write it out like that, I just used the Ubuntu GUI to mount the drives. This has pretty much been my first experience with the fstab and anything other very basic terminal usage so it’s been a steep learning curve unfortunately.
If you mean the Disks app as the gui to mount your partitions, it is not a good way. It uses one set of defaults and expects you to know to change those.
Better to find an example and change to use your UUIDs or labels and mount point.
Also if an external drive you need extra parameters.
Do not know mergerfs, so not sure what to suggest.
Did google search just to know a bit about it, but AI may not have good info.
I think the mergerfs portion should be correct, it’s been functional for several months. My docker apps are not currently displaying any issues with using it either.
I was able to update the fstab files with the UUIDs. Unfortunately, it did not make any changes to my situation. It still freezes on the boot screen, but my webapps are functional.
I have uploaded another bootinfo summary following the changes to the fstab. Ubuntu Pastebin
I am not seeing anything in Boot-Repair’s report. Perhaps someone else may.
What odel MSI system? What video card?
Do you have latest firmware updates for both MSI and SSD?
The Ubuntu firmware updater does not work for most motherboards as they do not upload firmware. I just turn off the updater, since it will never work & spends time looking.
You can see versions.
Compare firmware versions to vendors support site
sudo dmidecode -s bios-version
udisksctl status
For those with NVMe drives, install nvme-cli and you can see version & other NVMe info:
nvme - the NVMe storage command line interface utility (nvme-cli)
sudo nvme list
man nvme
Yes, plenty - many not suitable for publication here
With your HDD disks removed and /etc/fstab only mounting ESP, system and swap
Select the first menu item in Grub, quickly tap Esc
This should produce text output on your monitor
Hopefully, it may pause or stop completely and reveal a pertinent message?
If I did this correctly, it just brought me to a screen that says grub> and not really anything else.
Last night, I was able to get all my HDD’s reconnected and working. I can access all the files through my webapp filebrowser and the SMART checks say the disk health is 100% for them. Just in case that’s useful info.
I’m just so confused I can use all my web applications totally fine even the ones that interact with the file system, I just can’t get it to load the actual desktop.
