this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2026
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Solution:
Thanks to Neuromancer49@midwest.social for bringing this up. The solution from this thread actually works: https://forum.endeavouros.com/t/a-start-job-is-running-for-dev-disk-uui-running-for-5min/80783

tl;dr: force_drivers+=" uas usb_storage xhci_hcd xhci_pci " is all dracut needed

Original post below:
Alright I'm at the end of the rope with my Linux knowledge. So I need your help.
I'm on EndeavourOS and just recently upgraded to Linux 7.1.5, all upgrades thus far have been without issue. I am dual-booting but have Linux on its own SSD, and grub handles booting into Linux or Windows.
Now, after booting into Windows and back into Linux, Linux won't start.
The error:
A start job is running for /dev/disks/by-uuid/

Let me tell you what I've already done:

  • Regenerate mkinitrd with dracut
  • Regenerate grub.cfg and verified via diff it is identical to the current one
  • On a live usb verified that the UUIDs in the grub and fstab files are correct using the KDE partition manager (they are)
  • Verify on a live usb the SSD still works (data and everything is still there)
  • Changed the grub boot option on boot to check that the UUID is not hardcoded somewhere and can be changed (this is true, inputting a garbage UUID changes the boot error to A start job is running for /dev/disks/by-uuid/garbage-uuid

One last idea I had was to drop myself into the dracut emergency shell and actually check what's actually under /dev/disks/by-uuid and lo and behold: it's actually missing the drive.

Here's whats nuts tho: grub loads the drive by UUID as well, loads the initrd, and all that works. When I regenerated the initrd with dracut I could also tell that grub was now loading the newer initrd.

WHAT THE FUCK???

Help?

At this point I REALLY don't know wtf to do. Why doesnt the initramfs detect the drive? The only useful info I can add here is that all drives listed under /dev/disks/by-uuid had that shorter UUID with no dashes like ABCD1234, whereas the UUID for the correct drive/partition is the longer type UUID like abc1234-1234-0000-defg ___

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[–] BCsven@lemmy.ca 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Smarter people than me can answer, but I had two similar issues before. 1) I added nofail to fstab because in my situation it wasn't finding a certain drive and getting stuck, and 2) windows fastboot or hybernate had somehow made drive locked or appear dirty to linux

[–] ThunderComplex@lemmy.today 2 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Its not the fstab, I mean what am I gonna do, not mount the root drive? idk if its windows fastboot but this setup has been working for a couple months and survived windows and linux updates so this seems unlikely

[–] BCsven@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 week ago

No I realize that, for me it was stuck on a windows partition , which was irrelevant to Linux running. It sounds like it found some corruption and wants to do a full disk check. Or maybe their is a hardware fault arising.

Others may have better answers for you.

[–] BananaTrifleViolin@piefed.world 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Are your windows drives mounted in linux? If so comment them out in fstab or nofail them as a minimum, although it wouldn't normally manifest as a root drive error (unless you've set up a strange mount point for the windows drives outside /mnt on root or even in home folder? or do you have them listed above your root drive in fstab so they are trying to mount first and that fails?).

Also you said elsewhere your linux drives can be "seen" in windows. Just to be clear, you've not mounted the drives in Windows right using a tool like Ext2Fsd? Because if so, go into windows and unmount the drive.

And have you disabled fastboot? Not just rebooted but disabled fastboot completely?

[–] ThunderComplex@lemmy.today 8 points 1 week ago

I took a picture of the grub screen maybe that helps idk

[–] Adverse_Reaction@anarchist.nexus 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Just a passing thought, but have you checked if the root partition has any space left?

[–] ThunderComplex@lemmy.today 1 points 1 week ago

all partitions have space left

[–] lime@feddit.nu 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

can windows see the ssd? did you shut windows down the normal way or the hard way? because there's one way to shut down windows that is basically a hard hibernate, where it keeps control of the drives. i don't remember exactly how it works but it can lock other oses out.

It's not too hard to fix, but risky.

[–] ThunderComplex@lemmy.today 1 points 1 week ago (2 children)

yes windows sees the ssd. no I shut it down the normal way i.e. no hibernation.

[–] scutiger@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago

The "normal" Windows shutdown is not a real shutdown. I don't know if it will change anything for your situation, but for a full power off, you have to hold left shift while you click shutdown from the start menu, otherwise it is basically just hibernating.

[–] ScoffingLizard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Can you boot windows and shut it down normally again just to see if it was setting a dirty flag or something.

[–] ThunderComplex@lemmy.today 1 points 1 week ago

I'm constantly doing this. rebooting, shutting the whole PC down for a min then starting it again. def not windows' fault

[–] SavvyBeardedFish@reddthat.com 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Did you also update systemd at the same time? It might be worth reverting that update to see whether it's that causing the issues.

To me, this sounds more like an fstab/systemd-automount issue rather than a bootloader/initrd issue

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[–] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Yeah so grub can see the disk but then the kernel can't. Efi and other tricks aren't involved.

I think your route is to find out why the kernel hates your ass. Probably an upd pulled a driver ... But who removes the SATA or nvme stuff?

Either way, it's in the kernel and not the boot or the core apps. I don't use endeavour, where I could provide better help, but I think the kernel is your best suspect for this crime.

[–] ThunderComplex@lemmy.today 1 points 1 week ago (2 children)

well since endeavour is very close to arch I hope I'll find some solutions in that realm. But yeah I'm thinking something must've gone awry with the kernel.. hm I should downgrade that one too, only downgraded systemd but maybe 7.1.5 has some fuckery

[–] SavvyBeardedFish@reddthat.com 4 points 1 week ago

You could install linux-lts, I sometimes use that as a sanity check in case there is some kernel fuckery

[–] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 week ago

since endeavour is very close to arch I hope I’ll find some solutions in that realm.

Smart thinking. I don't use arch (btw) either, so I'm merely a cheerleader at this point. Yes, I'd downgrade the kernel for the sake of Science. Find a popular stable kernel, jump to that and see if it behaves better.

(That may be my bias: I only really do enterprise linux, so after 28 years since I moved from slackware I'm really risk-averse!)

[–] Neuromancer49@midwest.social 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Holy shit, are you me?

https://forum.endeavouros.com/t/boot-stuck-at-a-start-job-is-running-for-dev-disk-by-uuid-uuid-not-familiar/80086

One minor update I have from this experience, after building a new rig and restoring from a backup of the original system, I tried plugging in my SSD to my new computer and it isn't even recognized in BIOS. I was under the impression my drive failed.

[–] ThunderComplex@lemmy.today 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

hmm sad to see there's no solution in that thread. tho its weird a reinstall didn't fix the issue for you.

[–] Neuromancer49@midwest.social 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Agreed. I was under the impression mine was a graphics card issue, but the apparent failure of my hard drive is puzzling.

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[–] savvywolf@pawb.social 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Just for testing purposes, have you removed every device except the root device and sys/dev/tmp from fstab? I know Linux can get a bit upset when a NTFS filesysyem is marked as needing chkdsk'd and might be blocking other disks from mounting.

[–] ThunderComplex@lemmy.today 1 points 1 week ago
  1. all drives besides root are marked as nofail in my fstab, 2) I've already confirmed this issue happens way before the fstab file is ever read. The kernel can't even find the drive that the fstab file is on.
[–] jwt@programming.dev 4 points 1 week ago (6 children)

Did the problem begin right after a kernel upgrade? Slim chance, but only thing I can think of is maybe some module your boot process depends on is no longer built-in the kernel and needs to be added to initrd manually. I always have an LTS kernel installed as backup to be able to exclude these kind of fucky issues.

If you don't have an LTS kernel installed, you could try to boot a live usb, chroot into your EndeavourOS installation (don't forget to do a mount -a inside the chroot environment to mount boot and efi partitions) and install the LTS kernel. If you're able to reboot with an LTS kernel that makes debugging a whole lot easier. Best of luck.

(The 'shorter uuids' are probably the vfat boot and efi partitions btw. Maybe you have access to lsblk or blkid in rescue mode to give some hints? You could compare them to live usb outputs of those commands)

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[–] Fleppensteijn@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Check again whether windows reenabled fast boot. Maybe disable secure boot in bios as well.

In grub recovery mode, see which drives are there and try to cd into them.

[–] ThunderComplex@lemmy.today 1 points 1 week ago

I can see the drive's contents from the grub shell. not touching secure boot hehe

[–] ScoffingLizard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

This sounds like could be the bit locker function that windows usea. I had this issue with it locking my extra ntfs drive when I installed Linux over my whole primary partition. However, your Windows Drive should not be able to read your Linux drive.

If Windows bit locker function still caused the trouble, there is a way to fix it but it will continue to happen until you remove Windows.

If that is the case. Maybe something like ntfsfix command.

[–] ThunderComplex@lemmy.today 3 points 1 week ago

no drive encryption here, no bitlocker, no luks

[–] stuner@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

This sounds like a rather weird issue. I agree with your take that grub is not the problem. It seems that there is some issue with the kernel, or the initramfs systemd... Downgrading the kernel didn't resolve it, so maybe it is a corrupted disk after all? Some suggestions:

  1. Run fsck on the partition from a live USB if you haven't already
  2. Enable more verbose logs from the kernel and the initramfs systemd. The LLM suggests removing quiet splash and adding rd.debug systemd.log_level=debug systemd.log_target=console ignore_loglevel (best check the actual parameters yourself).
[–] ThunderComplex@lemmy.today 3 points 1 week ago

Ehh I’ll just back up my stuff and pack my bags for now. A reinstall is just gonna be faster at this point.

[–] OR3X@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Is the Linux disk still visible in your UEFI firmware?

[–] ThunderComplex@lemmy.today 1 points 1 week ago

Yeah it has to be, since the grub bootloader I use to boot either linux or windows is on the same disk as linux. If the UEFI firmware could not see the linux disk it couldn't load grub

[–] WhiteOakBayou@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Have you tried to boot from the grub shell manually? Here's a guide if trying that is something that interests you. It seems like you've tried most everything else.

[–] ThunderComplex@lemmy.today 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

thanks, I might try that tho I don't have high hopes since grub doesn't seem to be the issue. You never know tho

[–] WhiteOakBayou@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

Yeah, one more thing to try before you nuke and reroll. Good luck! I hope you're able to find a satisfactory conclusion to your problem.

[–] TruePe4rl@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 week ago

Not sure if my suggestion will be any help, but in the past I found out that macOS installer changes drive flags and removed some flags from my partitions. Fixed with efibootmgr.

[–] w33n1s@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

If you boot from a live CD, are you able to mount the drive?

Also, out of curiosity, is Windows on a separate physical disk than Linux? Or is it one disk partitioned for both?

[–] ThunderComplex@lemmy.today 1 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Update: I’m giving up. I tried every solution I could find. Tried the LTS kernel, fucking around with dracut options. I don’t know what the issue is or how to fix it.

I’ll be backing up my shit now and will move back to windows until I can find the brain power necessary for a reinstall.

Don’t know yet if I’ll stick to EndeavourOS or try nix or something, EOS worked out of the box with my NVIDIA card.

I want to thank everyone for your support. I would not have guessed for this issue to be so deep that it couldn’t be fixed, it is what it is I guess.

[–] eugenia@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 week ago

Just install a distro that doesn't fail like that by overwriting system files on a whim. You're saying that you're going from an arch based system (which are prone to get weird errors every few weeks), to NixOS, which has at the very least a steep learning curve. My assessment is that you are asking for trouble yourself. I know that Debian-stable sounds boring, but it never breaks like that. If you're truly burnt out as you say, you would go with the safe, unglamorous solution. I used to tinker with Linux all the time (I started on slackware in 1998), now I just run Mint on laptops, and Debian on my PCs. I just don't want bad surprises anymore, I'm at an age that the OS needs to work as expected.

[–] Neuromancer49@midwest.social 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

If you do switch back to Linux I'll note that Endeavour and other Arch forks have moved away from older NVIDIA cards because NVIDIA stopped supporting open source drivers. There's community-maintained solutions out there though. I forget exactly how old, but my 1080 got the boot, and then I had to gety Grover's from AUR for a bit, right before that security breach. That contributed to my decision to upgrade to a new AMD card.

[–] ThunderComplex@lemmy.today 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I'm on a RTX 4080 so I'm most definitely not switching to AMD just for Linux's sake. Tho as I sad EOS worked perfectly out of the box with all my hardware which was quite a surprise to me. I've had bad NVIDIA experience in the past, but that was also like 10 years ago with a Quadro card so... :D
More surprising was that my audio interface worked, but since it doesn't have Linux drivers, all Linux could do was play audio thru it, so most of the cool functionality just doesn't work.

[–] Neuromancer49@midwest.social 2 points 1 week ago (2 children)
[–] ThunderComplex@lemmy.today 1 points 1 week ago

ok this is surprising, ill try it out in a few

[–] ThunderComplex@lemmy.today 1 points 1 week ago

HOLY SHIT IT WORKED! Thanks for bringing this to my attention!

[–] uairhahs@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Hey I encountered a similar issue. The boot drive switched from mounting to /efi/ to /boot/ on the off chance that this may be causing the same issue for you check fstabs and your kernel cmdline

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