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[Help request] They say "don't break Debian" but apparently I managed to do it. (sopuli.xyz)

submitted 6 days ago by qyron@sopuli.xyz to c/linux@lemmy.ml

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While trying to move my computer to Debian, after allowing the installer to do it's task, my machine will not boot.

Instead, I get a long string of text, as follows:

Could not retrieve perf counters (-19)
ACPI Warning: SystemIO range 0x00000000000000B00-0x0000000000000B08 conflicts withOpRegion 0x0000000000000B00-0x0000000000000B0F (\GSA1.SMBI) /20250404/utaddress-204)
usb: port power management may beunreliable
sd 10:0:0:0: [sdc] No Caching mode page found
sd 10:0:0:0: [sdc] Assuming drive cache: write through
amdgpu 0000:08:00.0 amdgpu: [drm] Failed to setup vendor infoframe on connector HDMI-A-1: -22

And the system eventually collapses into a shell, that I do not know how to use. It returns:

Gave up waiting for root file system device. Common problems:
- Boot args (cat /proc/cmdline)
 - Check rootdelay= (did the system wait lomg enough?)
- Missing modules (cat /proc/modules; ls /dev)

Alert! /dev/sdb2 does not exist. Dropping to a shell!

The system has two disks mounted:

-- an SSD, with the EFI, root, var, tmp and swap partition, for speeding up the overall system -- an hdd, for /home

I had the system running on Mint until recently, so I know the system is sound, unless the SSD stopped working but then it is reasonable to expect it would no accept partitioning. Under Debian, it booted once and then stopped booting all together.

The installation I made was from a daily image, as I am/was aiming to put my machine on the testing branch, in order to have some sort of a rolling distro.

If anyone can offer some advice, it would be very much appreciated.

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[–] IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz 6 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Do you happen to have any USB (or other) drives attached? Optical drive maybe? In the first text block kernel suggests it found 'sdc' device which, assuming you only have ssd and hdd plugged in and you haven't used other drives in the system, should not exist. It's likely your fstab is broken somehow, maybe a bug in daily image, but hard to tell for sure. Other possibility is that you still have remnants of Mint on EFI/whatever and it's causing issues, but assuming you wiped the drives during installation that's unlikely.

Busybox is pretty limited, so it might be better to start the system with a live-image on a USB and verify your /etc/fstab -file. It should look something like this (yours will have more lines, this is from a single-drive, single-partition host in my garage):

# / was on /dev/sda1 during installation
UUID=e93ec6c1-8326-470a-956c-468565c35af9 /               ext4    errors=remount-ro 0       1
# swap was on /dev/sda5 during installation
UUID=19f7f728-962f-413c-a637-2929450fbb09 none            swap    sw              0       0

If your fstab has things like /dev/sda1 instead of UUID it's fine, but those entries are likely pointing to wrong devices. My current drive is /dev/sde instead of comments on fstab mentioning /dev/sda. With the live-image running you can get all the drives from the system running 'lsblk' and from there (or running 'fdisk -l /dev/sdX' as root, replace sdX with actual device) you can find out which partition should be mounted to what. Then run 'blkid /dev/sdXN' (again, replace sdXN with sda1 or whatever you have) and you'll get UUID of that partition. Then edit fstab accordingly and reboot.

[–] kumi@feddit.online 1 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Changing /etc/fstab only won't change anything if / can not be mounted. How would it pick up those changes? I think you are on the right track but missing the part with updating the initramfs.

https://feddit.online/post/1342935#comment_6604739

[–] IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz 1 points 4 days ago

Rootfs location is passed via kernel parameter, for example my grub.cfg has "set root='hd4,msdos1'". That's used by kernel and initramfs to locate the root filesystem and once 'actual' init process starts it already has access to rootfs and thus access to fstab. Initramfs update doesn't affect on this case, however verifying kernel boot parameters might be a good idea.

[–] Bane_Killgrind@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Tbf he said he doesn't know how to use the terminal, and he'll need to use at least sudo, vim and cat plus the stuff you mentioned. A drive getting inserted into the disk order is probably the correct thing, I thought UUID was the default on new installs for that reason...

[–] IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I'd argue that if the plan is to run Debian testing it's at the very least beneficial, if not mandatory, to learn some basics of the terminal. Debian doesn't ship with sudo by default, so it's either logging in directly as root or 'su'. Instead of vim (which I'd personally use) I'd suggest nano, but with live setup it's also possible to use mousepad or whatever gui editor happens to be available.

I suppose it'd be possible to use gparted or something to dig up the same information over GUI but I don't have debian testing (nor any other live distro) at hand to see what's available on it. I'm pretty sure at least stable debian installs with UUIDs by default, but I haven't used installer from testing in a "while" so it might be different.

The way I'd try to solve this kind of problem would be to manually mount stuff from busybox and start bash from there to get "normal" environment running and then fix fstab, but it's not the most beginner friendly way and requires some prior knowledge.

[–] Bane_Killgrind@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

mandatory

Yes but, not in the first few weeks.

My holistic suspicion is that OP has his home folder on a USB/esata drive and he's not telling yet.

Edit

Apparently no