[NTLUG:Discuss] systemd, mbr boot record recovery, but now can't mount anything (?)

[Steve Litt]

On Tue, 28 Jul 2015 10:36:26 -0400
"Chris Cox" <cjcox at acm.org> wrote:

> so... here is what happened.

[snip]

> 
> Anyhow, what tripped me up is something actually quite old.  It is the
> move away from "ata" to "scsi".  Again, this system has been around
> for awhile and it was running openSUSE 13.2 before the accident, but
> apparently there was something (maybe) held in place udev wise to
> present the compatibility links as we moved from "ata" to "scsi"
> especially in /dev/disk/by-id.
> 
> Anyhow, long story short, once I change things, I was able to mount
> again.
> 
> Now... when the problem was occurring, I had *one* erroneous line in
> /etc/fstab still referring to an device by "ata"..... and that caused
> complete chaos on the system (things like this didn't used to happen
> btw).


Here's what I want to know Chris. By what mental process did you
identify an fstab problem and the ata line? It sounds fairly obscure,
unless you've somehow narrowed it down. What was your thought process?
 
[snip]
 
> As for systemd... essentially "how to hide everything you knew and
> make it extremely hard to diagnose and troubleshoot anything".

On Ubuntu 15.04, you can't even do the old init=/bin/bash thing: You
come up within the initramfs, in some busybox like environment, with no
mounts, and switchroot doesn't work. I'm going to try to figure out how
to attack that situation intelligently.

SteveT

Steve Litt 
July 2015 featured book: Rapid Learning for the 21st Century
http://www.troubleshooters.com/rl21