Somehow the EFI partition doesn’t mount and it’s impossible to troubleshoot via phone, she asked me to put back the old system 😞
Really out of my depth here, but anyway—
What model computer does your mom have? Does it by any chance have solid state drives that are RAID 0?
Have you tried Linux Mint? After really struggling with Fedora, I was able to get Mint up and running after a few minimal problems and haven’t looked back since.
It’s good your mom tried. It’s sad she gave up so soon. I’ve helped 4 people switch in the past months. I’ve gotten even more people curious and more open to switch. A success is not only the switch, but that people start to realize that they can. In my opinion. :-)
How is
/etc/fstabconfigured? Partitions should be assigned to mount points by UUID and not by their names (such as/dev/sda1). Names can easily change across boots.Something to look into. Understand the frustrations here, but it looks like something that can be fixed if you are able to get to the machine and troubleshoot.
How the heck is mom supposed to know what an fstab is?
RTFM, Mom!
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What distro did this happen on?
How long ago did you install it?
Pop os, a few months ago
Try silverblue or kinoite something immutable that will not break
Bluefin/Aurora is the most sane option in that space, stock Silverblue offerings are lacking a few essentials.
For me personally no,they both over bloated with many useless tools,why installing custom terminals dozens no need containers waydroid and else .From my case what elderly was need is browser and office and some social apps that it nothing more
Are updates being done by the OS automatically or are you going into the terminal and running an apt-get upgrade periodically?
I’ve had issues when I do a terminal update because I believe that Pop expects you to do an apt-get dist-upgrade
Pop os wasn’t the best distribution to start her on. It’s new. Unstable and updates often. Linux mint, Debian, fedora.
It’s new. Unstable and updates often.
Are you thinking of some other distribution?
Pop! hasn’t released a new version since 2022 and rarely updates aside from security patches.
Your using pop os cosmic? Its still I alpha stage.
wild
I’ve been off and on popos for like a 5 years and other than early issues with sound and Bluetooth, don’t ever even think about
This EFI thing is literally squarely a Microsoft induced problem.
You must work in tech support with that attitude to the problem 🤣
The user has a problem. Do you want to be right or do you want a satisfied user? I can tell you which path popular operating systems choose.
And I say this 5 different OSes at home, 3 of which are Linux distros.
I don’t think that the point here was trying to do anything to say that the user did anything wrong. I think it’s simply pointing out how frustrating it is that Microsoft’s Insistence on various things, as part of their EEE policy, created this situation to begin with, and that it wouldn’t have even broken if not for that.
I’m pretty sure that the person you replied to was really just lamenting that that this is what broke it. And that fundamentally, Microsoft is getting exactly what they wanted as a result. And it’s just frustrating.
A satisfied user and RCA are equally important.
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Could it be a dying SSD?
At least your mom was cool enough to try. I had to trick my mom into using linux by putting a macOS themed, KDE, debian on an old macbook that was identical to her dead macbook
Was she tricked? I would think the jig would be up the second she clicked on something.
Would be tricked if you just say “apple forced an update.”
My mom is old. Her whole workflow is just open the browser and go to gmail, and forward me a bunch of spams…
Whether its on iOS or debian, you can’t tell the difference unless you’re looking hard
Loool, all the people who are trying to help you troubleshoot are 1) probably correct and 2) completely missing the point. I have a Windows desktop, a Mac, and a Linux desktop at home and this kind of shit only happens on Linux these days.
You’re right, this never happens on windows. It’s so robust no one ever complains
/s
People complain about all the invasive controlling bullshit Windows does. I haven’t seen any kind of failure to boot issue with windows in a long time and I work in IT. Last thing I really remember being common in our organization was bitlocker getting triggered and people having to call in to get the key to unlock it, and that was back in the windows 7 days.
Windows can boot and still be fucked. User can login and still be fucked.
Explorer crash and respawn loop. Taskbar not responding. Windows failing to update and still hogging every reboot. Networking settings get fucked up.
Also booting and even logging in does not mean a person can actually use his computer for his purposes. OneDrive deleting your work files from your laptop can fuck up a guy on the go.
Of course these people are not part of a bigger organization that managed their machines, just like OP’s mom. If anything I would say your experiences in IT out you out of touch with most PC and even Windows users.
I was specifically talking about boot errors. I acknowledged that people complain about other problems with window. Just saying that problems booting, especially with partition issues, is not typical and I had not seen one in a long time. That particular thing windows does fairly well.
There was a point in my career where I was working with 30-40 windows users a day on any and all issues they had but sure I don’t have experience with them…
Literally happened updating just yesterday so I went to an older boot entry. The Matrix channel blamed my hardware, but the older revision boots just fine
Right but you see it never happened to that person so it means it’s like that for everybody else. Clearly you are wrong. /s
How am I the only one who does have annoying issues like this on Windows (except that Windows only gives a useless error code at most) while Linux has failed to boot a total of once (without me explicitly changing nvidia drivers).
You aren’t. My bf has constant problems with Windows that he barely knows how to diagnose (not that he isn’t knowledgeable about computers, the problems are just…opaque.) He doesn’t seem to perceive them as being related to Windows, though. I think that might be what’s going on with a lot of people.
System breaking errors that doesn’t allow you to even login?
Windows have lots of issues, but it’s been a while since I found those system breaking issues to be somehow common.
For all their shit, credit myst be given when credit is due. And windows it’s become a really robust systems against layer 8 issues. Even powering off middle update is kind of easy to recover (I have to solve this issue for a user recently).
I’ve only had it quite that bad once when I just rebooted and it decided to pull an update. After that the bios was unable to find any of the bootloaders on my system. (Fixed with a lot fiddling from a liveusb. Is a dual boot system but I haven’t touched Windows on it since 2023)
These other ones just made it unusable. Another time on a laptop it pulled updates in the background and would crash itself just after login. (Needed to be reinstalled and I lost some data which wasn’t backed up yet. setup by manufacturer)
Then on a different desktop system it just would bsod every few minutes, barely leaving time to go through logs. (I finally fixed it by changing a BIOS setting and reinstalling Windows, setup by manufacturer installed Linux on a separate drive and it was fine until the drive malfunctioned)
This was not a crash, just a thirty minute delay. A couple of days ago that device did an update without me even logging in. I accidentally started windows, then immediately selected reboot in the power menu before entering a password. It then ‘prepared’ something and told me not to reboot, bypassed grub, rebooted again, bypassed grub (after I missed the bios), rebooted again back into grub.
My MacBook is getting very long in the tooth and the updates via OCLP are working in creating a system that is painfully slow to use. I’ve been tinkering with various Linux distros for 20 years and the thought of having one as my only daily driver does not sound appealing. I really don’t want to drop the money on a new laptop but I need something to work without constantly troubleshooting.
I have Linux running on 6 different MacBooks (2009 - 2021). They were all EndeavourOS at first though some are Chimera Linux now.
They run great. Even the 2009 really.
Thank you. I’ve not tried EndeavorOS, so I’ll check it out! Most of what I’ve been running have been flavors of Ubuntu with a brief Gentoo and OpenSUSE period.
If the EFI partition truly was at fault, you wouldn’t get into Linux. And if the issue is mounting the efi partition after booting, that shouldn’t be a critical error. So it sounds like something else is at fault IMO
Out of curiosity what did you install ? And what did you install it on ?
RIP, this is sad day today
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
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.
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.
