Ubuntu

Ubuntu 18.04 booting into emergency mode and then exiting it I can login

Asked by Jignesh Gohel

Hello,

I have a Dell Laptop on which I had factory-installed Ubuntu and at the time of writing this I am using Ubuntu 18.04.6 LTS. From past few days all of a sudden when I restart my laptop it takes quite an amount of time to boot and then goes into emergency mode. On the emergency mode screen when I hit Enter the root user prompt appears and when I type exit, fortunately I can see the login screen and can get into the system and start using it.

Checking the `journalctl -xb` logs I can see red entries like `systemd[1]: Timed out waiting for device`.

I tried following recommendations to look for any problems

-- Ran fsck and e2fsck using live USB for Ubuntu but found the ext4 partitions reported clean and for fat32 partitions "superblock could not be read"

-- Ran boot-repair from live USB

/etc/fstab, journalctl logs, blkid output, e2fsck result, fsck results, boot-repair summary can be found in my post at https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2475622. Since the thread is quite long and contains lots of details I thought it doesn't make sense to copy all of them here. But if needed please let me know and I can add them here. Until then requesting anybody who can help to refer that post for details.

Thanks.

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Manfred Hampl (m-hampl) said : 		#1

The fact that first you get a timeout error, but everything works then (at least this is what I read from your reports), sounds more like a hardware problem that a software error.
Is there a DELL Diagnostics program that you can run?
You might consider cautiously disassembling the system, removing the hard disk and carefully re-inserting it to make sure that all contacts of the connectors are correctly fit into their position.
Eventually also some setting in the BIOS is not correct or not the optimal value. Resetting the BIOS to default sane values may be worth trying.

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