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Zephyr Zephyroff
Asked: 2018-11-05 03:24:50 +0800 CST

home partition not mounted during system startup

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I tried to install another OS alongside with the current Ubuntu 16.04, but at the end of the installation process when grub should be installed a fatal error occurred. Since then, I cannot boot to my OS any longer. "Welcome to emergency mode" is what I see instead of login screen. I found that /home partition isn't mounted. To mount it I do mount -a in this "emergency mode" then press Ctrl + D and then the OS is loading normally. mount /etc/sda9 /home && systemctl default also works fine.

Here is my fstab:

# / was on /dev/sda8 during installation
UUID=43c8292e-dfce-4191-9040-8797667be0e3 /      ext4   errors=remount-ro 0  1
# /boot was on /dev/sda7 during installation
UUID=2b80fd17-a9d5-4c80-8e6e-d917f4e02cc0 /boot  ext2   defaults  0     2
# /home was on /dev/sda9 during installation
UUID=0873df66-f7fe-416c-bebf-eec4e26f11e7 /home  ext4   defaults  0     2
# swap was on /dev/sda6 during installation
UUID=52728841-4b38-416b-888c-9742e98a2943 none   swap    sw     0       0

What can I do to get it back to work?

boot partitioning mount

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The problem was with the partition itself. I used fsck -vf /dev/sda9 (sda9 was the home partition, I knew it from /etc/fstab file). This command found and fixed some errors and OS was able to start normally again. Thank everybody for help!

    • 3

  2. In my case, the root partition is not mounted by default. Where one has to mount manually through the shell root prompt of advance boot options using the command by pressing ctrl+alt+f3 | f4 | f5 while booting.

    1. perform a thorough fsck on all partitions before mounting. lsblk will show you all the partition names.

    2. fsck /dev/{partition-name}

    3. remount all the partitions with read-write access mount -n -0 remount, rw /

    4. type exit and resume your boot without rebooting
    5. you should be able to login by now.

    For a permanent solution, one has to find the root partition 6. using command lsblk or manually finding from the directory /dev/your-root-partition. you can cat /etc/fstab to find the root partition It will say

    # / was on /dev/{your-partition-name} during installation

    1. edit the fstab in the /etc/fstab to mount the root partition while booting automatically with rw access and add

      /dev/{your-boot-directory} / ext3 rw 0 1

    2. save the file and update your grub

      sudo update-grub

    3. reboot now it should login as normal.

    Credits:

    https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=118114

    https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/264598/system-will-not-boot-because-boot-partition-is-missing

    https://geek-university.com/linux/etc-fstab-file/

    https://linux.die.net/man/8/mount

    • 0