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Started up my laptop today, which is a Dell XPS 13 9370 running Ubuntu 18.04 OEM, and got this craziness basically out nowhere:

Alert! UUID=xxxxxxxxxx does not exist. Dropping to a shell!

Followed by:

random: 7 urandom warning(s) missed due to ratelimiting boot

I have run hardware scans. Everything's good.

I have tried a variety of fixes I found online, most of them being some variation of this, and none of them work. Usually because it can't mount anything, or it doesn't recognize fstab, or one of a million other errors. I have honestly gotten so many errors I can't remember them all.

I tried reinstalling Ubuntu from a live USB (which does boot up) with data preservation, but it can't find my drive and doesn't realize I already have Ubuntu installed, and therefore it doesn't give me the option of preserving data. It can't even see my drive. I actually don't know if it's even possible for me to reinstall it.

I have also tried to correct it in the terminal from my live boot, but the only other computer I have is also Ubuntu, and it screws up the permissions on every single USB drive I use it with, so I don't have write permissions on my boot drive and therefore I can't change anything. Yes, I've tried GParted. Yes, I've tried killall nautilus. Yes, I've tried chmod in a thousand different ways. None of them work.

Does anyone have ANY suggestion for me? Please. I'm about ready to just throw it in the trash and pretend I never had a laptop.

Thanks to anyone who can help.

Cat V
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1 Answers1

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Found the answer here! “initramfs” error on boot ONLY on Dell XPS 13 (boots fine on other computer)

BIOS --> System Configuration --> SATA Operation Changed from RAID to AHCI.

I'm still not sure what triggered this -- seemingly some kind of automatic update, as my initrd files had recently been altered. But changing from RAID to AHCI seems to have fixed it persistently.

Cat V
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  • I'm glad to hear you eventually found a solution. I just received my new work laptop, and it turns out I had to change the exact same BIOS setting on it before I was able to install Ubuntu. It's not surprising that the storage driver in the BIOS supports operating in both modes given that the BIOS can switch between them. But it just seems Ubuntu doesn't have drivers for the RAID operation mode, and not really important to have since Linux software RAID is likely a better choice anyway. – kasperd Jan 03 '19 at 13:22
  • Why RAID would be the default on a machine with only a single media is a bit puzzling. And it's also not clear how that setting would be changed for you just from an update installing new initrd images. When I go to the BIOS settings and change this setting it does warn me that the OS may need to be reinstalled, though in reality a reinstall is not quite sufficient when Linux doesn't seem to have drivers usable for the RAID operation mode. – kasperd Jan 03 '19 at 13:25