ArchLinux crashed with error 'Unable to find root device...Youre are being dropped to a recovery shell'

After been using Ubuntu/Fedora alternately one after the other for couple of years, I decided to use Arch Linux because of its concept of rolling-release unlike Ubuntu/Fedora. So on February 23rd I installed Arch on my system. It was working all good till June 11,2016 evening. When I suddenly bumped into an error when I booted up my system. I don't know what cause the error. As far as I remember , I forgot the update that was running in my guake terminal last time when I shutdown my computer. And then when I came back to turn it on. I had this error on my screen:

Warning: /lib/modules/4.6.2-1-Arch/modules-.devname not found --ignoring
starting version 229
Error : device 'UUID=xxxxxx-xxxx-xxx-xxx-xxxxxx' not found skipping fsck.
Error: Unable to find root device 'UUID=xxxxxx-xxxx-xxx-xxx-xxxxxx'.
Youre are being dropped to a recovery shell
    Type 'exit' to try and continue booting
sh: can't access tty: job control tunred off
[rootfs]#_
First thing I tried to do was type 'help' in the shell presented; the keyboard didn't respond. I was clueless. And then I started searching for this error in different forums for a fix. And somewhere I saw '# mkinitcpio -p linux' should fix it. So what I did was create bootable usb with the command.
#dd if=arch.iso of=/dev/rdisk2 bs=1m
You can find the USB installation guide at : https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/USB_flash_installation_media.
After booting my pc with the bootable USB. I was automatically logged in as root of the usb bootable system. I did a quick check to see the name of my drive using the command :
root@archiso~# fdisk -l
I could see my partitions there the way I had set, so I went to ahead to mount my drives(root drive was /dev/sda2) and use the swap (swap was /dev/sda1).

root@archiso~# mount /dev/sda2 /mnt
root@archiso~# swapon /dev/sda1 

Then I ch-rooted into my system using the command:
root@archiso~# arch-root /mnt
And then I installed grub to my hard drive. The command to install is:
sh-4.3# grub-install /dev/sda
After grub was installed to the drive, I generated the init file with the command below:
sh-4.3# mkinitcpio -p linux
To generate grub configuration file I ran command:
sh-4.3#grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
After that I exited from the ch-root with the command exit
Then I unmount my drive with the command:
root@archiso~#umount /mnt
and rebooted my system.
My system was all running back again.Hope this post can help you resecue your system from similar situtation.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Automate file upload in Selenium IDE

Image
Selenium IDE is an integrated development environment for Selenium tests. It records your interactions with websites to help you generate and maintain site automation, tests, and remove the need to manually step through repetitive tasks. Selenium IDE can be installed in Google Chrome from  here . For Firefox visit this  link . File upload in Selenium IDE cannot be automated simply by recording from the IDE. Because when we select the file input field, the dialog that opens up is a system window which cannot be controlled by Selenium IDE. Therefore, clicking the input file field to select a file will not work. Also the selected file path is changed to C:\fakepath\filename.extension. So to fix this issue, we need to configure the browser to support file upload and then instead of clicking the input field we set the file using ‘type’ selenium command which is shown below. First, to support file upload in Selenium IDE, configure your browser to support file upload: Visit ‘...
Read more

How To Install and Configure Nextcloud

Image
  Original post: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-and-configure-nextcloud-on-ubuntu-20-04 Step 1 – Installing Nextcloud We will be installing Nextcloud using the  Snap  packaging system. This packaging system, available on Ubuntu 20.04 by default, allows organizations to ship software, along with all associated dependencies and configuration, in a self-contained unit with automatic updates. This means that instead of installing and configuring a web and database server and then configuring the Nextcloud app to run on it, we can install the  snap  package which handles the underlying systems automatically. To download the Nextcloud snap package and install it on the system, type: sudo snap install nextcloud Copy The Nextcloud package will be downloaded and installed on your server. You can confirm that the installation process was successful by listing the changes associated with the snap: snap changes nextcloud Copy Output I...
Read more

Bruteforce a router to hack admin password using Hydra

Image
Hydra can be used for bruteforce attack on a router to retrieve admin's password. For this, a password list needs to be created for my case it is password.lst. The username I am using in the bruteforce attack is admin and the router's password is 192.168.1.19 which might differ for your case. The command is as follows that I used: hydra -l admin -P password.lst 192.168.1.19 http-get -m / The above image shows a screenshot of my attack used on my TP-LINK router. The found password is underlined by red underline.
Read more