Linux @lemmy.ml evasync @lemmy.world 2 wk. ago

cant mount home on boot

Im giving a go fedora silverblue on a new laptop but Im unable to boot (and since im a linux noob the first thing i tried was installing it fresh again but that didnt resolve it).

its a single drive partitioned to ext4 and encrypted with luks (its basically the default config from the fedora installation)

any ideas for things to try?

40 comments

The error says /home is a symlink, what if you ls -l /home?

Since this is an atomic distro, /home might be a symlink to /var/home.
- yes it is a symlink to /var/home
  
  So shouldn't you mount your home partition on /var/home instead?
- the command returns my user dir and a lost+found dir
  
  that actually sounds like it's already mounted
  
  What's in lost+found
There well may be hardware issues, but with ext4 it rarely corrupts the entire file system. You might end up with some data not flushed so you'll have some inodes that don't point to anything that you'll remove with fsck upon boot, but btrfs, I've had it corrupt and lose the entire file system. I've used ext2-through-ext4 for as long as they've existed and never lost a file system though back in the ext2 days I had to hand repair them a few times, but ext2 was sufficiently simple that that was not difficult, but within two weeks of turning up a btrfs file system it shit itself in ways I could not recover anything, the entire file system was lost. If I did not have backups, which of course I always do, I would have been completely fuxored. It is my opinion that btrfs and xfs, both of which have advantages, are also both not sufficiently stable for production use.
rm /home
mkdir /home
make /var/home a symlink to it.
Alternative, edit your /etc/fstab to mount on /var/home.
- Don't you have that backwards? This is an atomic distro, and you'd want to mkdir /var/home then symlink /home from that, no? Otherwise, you'll wind up with a home directory that is immutable.
  
  @Telorand I am not familiar with that distro, I am however familiar with how mount works. As far as what is immutable and what is not, you can set with chattr +i file/directory or chattr -i file/directory.
- editing the /etc/fstab didnt work (I just changed the path but not sure if the uuid plays any part) but ill give the rm/mkdir part a go
  
  Did you update your initramfs after? The new fstab doesn’t apply until you refresh that
  
  Make sure the uuid matches the uuid of the home partition you want, you can list uuids with blkid I think, big noob here too I just spent my last week trying to figure out why it wouldnt mount my boot partition and the problem was the UUID...
Isn't the default filesystem btrfs? Why did you go with ext4
- @possiblylinux127 @evasync I can't speak for them, but I've had btrfs blow up in ways I could not fix. I didn't just lose a file but the entire file system. I have NEVER had this happen in many years with ext4.
  
  Was that in the last 5 years? If it was btrfs is now far more stable. It has never blown up for me and it has in fact saved my data a few times.
  
  I've only had this happen once and it turned out it was because my ram was shitting out errors that were saved to disk so it ended up not being btrfs's fault
  
  ext4 is just terrible for the inode issue, because you'll be forced to reformat and reinstall again. Anyone using NixOS or Guix with multiple store write operation should not go near it.
  
  Lol same thing happened to me about 6 months ago. Overheating and/or a failing M2 and system corruption. btrfs got weird and troubleshooting only made it worse.
Did you reformat the disk before installing? I've seen similar fails when the disk is still encrypted. The installer can't get a hold of a previously encrypted disk. If there's no valuable data in the disk, load up a live distro run gparted and nuke the disk blank and pristine again, as gparted doesn't care about encryption. Then try the installer again.
- @dustyData @evasync When I install, I generally prepare the partitions ahead of time with gparted, whether or not I create an entirely new partition table depends upon whether it is the only OS on the disk or there are multiple. I'm not using any encrypted file systems, I need the machines to be able to boot without my being present to type in a password or pass phrase. So that is not an issue.
- no, I just removed them with the live cd and repartitioned it (Im assuming its doing the same thing under the hood?)
  
  You should let the installer do the partitioning. Silverblue and immutable systems are nitpicky about it. Specially if luks is involved. The whole point is that you shouldn't meddle with the system at a low level at all.
That’s what she said.

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