Thank you all for the assistance. It turns out that I was chasing ghosts - The original crash was due to a corrupted file. I fixed that pretty quickly, but my follow up issue was the consistent booting into emergency mode that I could not understand. The error message I transcribed for this email was a real one, but not related to my inability to boot. The true cause: My external hardrive was added to my /etc/fstab file so that it could have special read permissions so I can have a media server software called Jellyfin read and write to the disk on startup by default. My solution was to add "nofail" to the options on that fstab entry.
The entire time my inability to boot was due to my unplugging the "essential" external hard-drive and the PC was just following the rules I made in fstab. Christian On Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 2:21 PM Christian M. <[email protected]> wrote: > Greetings, > > I'd like to ask for help with my personal machine if that is okay. I'll > list the errors first then explain how I think it occured, and then what I > have done so far. > > The system of mine is stuck in emergency mode. The error from the > journalctl is transcribed by me with some abbreviation (in parentheses) and > listed by line to break it up a bit: > > Each Line is prefaced with: > Sep 10 13:29:47 fedora > > Line 1: > audit[1]: SERVICE_STOP pid(id),uid(id),ses(id), > subj=system_u:system_r:init_t:s0 msg='unit=systemd-rfkill comm="systemd" > exe="(PATH)/systemd" hostname=? addr=? terminal=? res=success' > > Line 2: > kernel: kauditd_printk_skb: 35 callbacks suppressed > > Line 3: > kernel: audit: type(id) audit(id): pid,uid,auid,ses(ids) > subj=system_u:system_r:init_t:s0 msg='unit=systemd-rfkill comm="systemd" > exe="(PATH)/systemd" hostname=? addr=? terminal=? res=success: > > Line 4: > sytemd[1]: dev-disk-by\x2duuid-ACB0\x2d8373.device: Job > dev-disk-by\x2duuid-ACB0\x2d8373.device/start timed out. > > Line 5: > systemd[1]: Timed out waiting for device > dev-disk-by\x2duuid-ACB0\x2d8373.device - /dev/disk/by-uuid/ACB0-8373 > > LINES 6-10: > Subject: A start job for unit dev-disk-by\x2duuid-ACB0\x2d8373.device has > failed > Defined-By systemd > Support: (this mailing list) > A start job for dev-disk-by\x2duuid-ACB0\x2d8373.device has finished with > a failure. > The job identifier is 236 and the job result is timeout. > > Incase any of the values I replaced with (id) are needed, for my own > reference, the actual 1st line number is 3169. I transcribed this my hand > on my cell phone and it was hell, lol. > > > So, I actually don't know if this error message is related to my overall > problem: my fedora PC is stuck booting into emergency mode. The speculated > cause is my PC was installing a kernel update when a shutdown command was > executed. Specifically I ran, "sudo dnf update && shutdown now". Normally > this installs updates and gracefully shutdown afterwards. > > > I have so far: > 1) regenerated initramfs for all kernels > 2) Rebuilt GRUB configuration > 3) Reset my root user password (this solved the error message before > emergency mode which said that the OS was unable to load the root user's > account) > 4) Edited the /etc/fstab to have root directory setting changed from 0 0 > to 0 1 so it should presumably boot first. > No affect will likely change it back. > > I dont know for sure if this is a drive issue as searching the internet > has tried to tell me. I believe and hope the transcribed error message > above is the cause and fixing that will restore my system. > > Any assistance is appreciated! > > Regards, > Christian >
