0

I have a Dell Precision T7910 Workstation with no other OS in it, the power went down in the whole city while the workstation was on, after the power came back I tried turning on the workstation but I get into emergency mode with the error:

systemd[1]: Failed to start Load Kernel Modules.
FAT-fs (sda1): IO charset iso8859-1 not found
Welcome to emergency mode! After logging in, type "journalctl -xb" to view
system logs, "systemctl reboot" to reboot, "systemctl default" or ^D to
try again to boot into default mode.
Press Enter for maintenance

After pressing Enter, I'm logged in as root without typing a password (WTF Ubuntu? Seriously?)

  • System boot is set to UEFI.
  • /dev/sda is a 256GB SSD
    • /dev/sda1 is /boot/efi (vsfat)
    • /dev/sda2 is / (ext4)
  • /dev/sdb is a 1TB HDD
    • /dev/sdb1 is the swap partition
    • /dev/sdb2 is /home (ext4)

A simple fsck /dev/sda1 doesn't show any errors.

I can't boot from a live USB neither in UEFI mode, nor in Legacy mode. (USB stick does boot in other systems)

If I try to boot in Legacy mode I get the following error:

error: unknown filesystem.
Entering rescue mode...
grub rescue>

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Pilot6
  • 90,100
  • 91
  • 213
  • 324
cesaramirezfr
  • 63
  • 2
  • 7
  • 1
    WTF Ubuntu? Seriously? - yeah, whoever gets hold of the keyboard connected to your machine can gain root without any bigger effort anyway. (interrupt grub -> add "1" to end of kernel line and boot) – Phillip -Zyan K Lee- Stockmann Aug 18 '16 at 16:27
  • Wow, how can I prevent that from happening? – cesaramirezfr Aug 18 '16 at 16:40
  • This is off topic, but encrypting your system can help you with it. – Phillip -Zyan K Lee- Stockmann Aug 18 '16 at 17:50
  • Was your system at some special job? Updating grub, kernel or something when the outage hit it? – Phillip -Zyan K Lee- Stockmann Aug 18 '16 at 17:53
  • If your system is UEFI, trying to boot in legacy mode is a waste of time. Did you try running fsck on all your ext4 partitions? It looks like you only ran it on the FAT32 which should be dosfsck or fsck.vfat which really are the same. – oldfred Aug 18 '16 at 17:55
  • Reinstalling the grub-uefi stuff might solve the problem. Though on my mobile I only found the German ubuntuusers wiki: https://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/GRUB_2/Reparatur/#GRUB-2-erneut-in-den-MBR-der-Festplatte-installieren search for the command where the uefi stuff is --reinstall'ed. – Phillip -Zyan K Lee- Stockmann Aug 18 '16 at 18:00
  • @Phillip-ZyanKLee-Stockmann thanks for the tip, I was installing some texlive packages when the outage hit... – cesaramirezfr Aug 18 '16 at 18:07
  • @oldfred Yes, I ran fsck -A but it didn't detect any errors... – cesaramirezfr Aug 18 '16 at 18:08
  • I should have link to this. I prefer the full e2fsck. The quick fsck may only check if filesystem reports an error. http://askubuntu.com/questions/642504/ubuntu-14-04-is-not-booting-normaly-after-a-manual-hard-boot/642789#642789 – oldfred Aug 18 '16 at 18:23
  • @Phillip-ZyanKLee-Stockmann thanks for the help, I tried reinstalling grub-efi packages but it didn't work, but it occured to me I hadn't tried booting another kernel... 4.4.0-31 booted OK (4.4.0-34 was the one not booting), rebooted and now the system is working fine. Thank you for your help! :) – cesaramirezfr Aug 18 '16 at 18:29
  • @oldfred thanks for the link, that wasn't the problem after all but it's always nice to learn new tools! :) – cesaramirezfr Aug 18 '16 at 18:30

1 Answers1

0

Solution by OP:

So I was installing some texlive-* packages when the outage hit, I tried booting from a previous kernel and it worked, after rebooting everything is normal again

Pilot6
  • 90,100
  • 91
  • 213
  • 324