On Thu, Apr 20, 2017 at 07:11:53AM -0700, Larry Dighera wrote: > I'm familiar with the dmesg output at boot time. I see that when I choose > to boot into recovery mode from the grub menus. When the scrolling text > stops, I'm left with what I thought was a frozen screen, but it turns out to > be login, without a prompt, waiting for me to provide the root password. > Once I submit the root password, I have a command line interface to a > reasonably functional Debian system.
Debian's GRUB menu passes a "quiet" parameter[1] to the kernel to suppress most of the normal messages. If this parameter is omitted (e.g. when you use the "Recovery mode" choice in GRUB), you get kernel messages from various subsystems as they are brought up. Before systemd, booting was a much more linear process. Subsystems would be brought up one by one, and when enough of them were ready, you'd get a login prompt. Now, however, the highly parallelized systemd boot means multiple subsystems are being brought up simultaneously, and some of them are still initializing when the login prompt is displayed. If you're also seeing their output, what this means is *sometimes*, depending on how the race conditions play out, you might get system output *after* the login prompt has already been displayed. If you aren't carefully reading everything on the screen, it may be easy to overlook the login prompt buried several lines up (or in a very bad case scenario, even scrolled off the visible terminal). Normally, once things seem like they've reached a stable point, if you aren't sure if there's a login prompt, it should be safe for you to press Enter. If you're seeing a regular getty login prompt, then you should simply get another one. If you're getting the single user mode "enter root password to continue" prompt, you should get another one of those as it considers your blank password to be a failed login attempt, and it shouldn't self-destruct or anything like that after just one failed attempt. [1] See GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT in /etc/default/grub.