23h ago

For my mom the year of the Linux desktop it's already over

Somehow the EFI partition doesn't mount and it's impossible to troubleshoot via phone, she asked me to put back the old system 😞

You're viewing a single thread.

52 comments

Sounds like a hardware issue, so ...
- This is every kernel update for me on Fedora. For some reason root is not set.
  
  Yours will copy a record in your grub config, for every kernel install, because that's the easiest way to get your ancillary settings. If it's happening truly every time, then I'll bet that's borked somehow.
  I ran into this because grub config now needs an additional magical parameter no one mentions, because it manages new bits to create the parts it needs with your old setup to solve no real problem. It could also be keeping a bad root statement and perennially dropping it into every new boot config. Yay! I don't remember what it was and I'm not at work, but I'll try to check later and see if I can offer some help.
  
  Oh. Do tell. Curious.
- Seems like only the EFI partition is missing. She told me "ls /home/her name" shows stuff but "ls /boot/efi" is empty
  Apparently this happened by itself
  I should have chosen something like silverblue but I wasn't familiar with that
  
  How does it even get into emergency mode without the efi partition?
  
  The EFI partition isn't missing or, you're right, it wouldn't boot at all.
  If the /boot/efi isn't set to nofail in fstab then it failing to mount would dump them into emergency mode. This could also be cause by something simple like a syntax error in fstab.
  It's also possible that there's a broken bootloader entry. For example, If the system was installed with LUKS encryption on the home directory and one of the boot entry doesn't have the luks module. The system would boot but everything after that would fail because it can't decrypt and mount /home.
  The screenshot isn't useful, those BPF errors are likely a symptom of the original problem but they pushed the real error off screen. We'd need to see the output of journactl -xb in order to figure it out.
  e: I forgot my unhelpful advice: Tell her to try Arch.
  
  Bluefin or Bazzite are very streamlined and easy to set up, with all the batteries included. The little you need to learn is more than offset by the convenience.
  
  Its not so easy for a user to screw-up that partition. Same things that would do it in Linux would do it in Windows.

52 comments