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/<CORRECT 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
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.
Thing is every time I read about Nix I get a bit excited about it and I just read smth about it before posting this. Tho I do have bad experience with breaking a franken debian install once way back when :D
I’ll obvs do research and maybe some distro hopping before deciding on the next thing, but imma chill for a while now. Specially cause I slept kinda bad because my brain kept trying to fix the distro in bed ><
That suicide did a number on me