[SOLVED] Windows improper shutdown, fedora won't start
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Running Fedora 20 and Win 7 together on a laptop. Had windows running, shut the lid (I don't know if it went on standby, hibernate, or just screen-off), and forgot about it. Battery died, so I go to boot fedora, and kept getting weird errors, it wouldn't boot. Basically, fedora would take me to emergency mode, let me log in as root, and suggested a few commands to review logs. The logs just showed everything starting then stopping, looked like runlevel 1 maybe, I'm not sure. It wouldn't let me set runlevel 4 or 5, it would try and then just go back to emergency mode.
I booted windows, which showed a recovery prompt, and then shut it down properly, then linux now boots correctly. Win7 is a primary partition, and fedora is in an extended partition along with a linux swap, if that makes any difference.
Here is my question: what does windows have to do with any linux partitions (AFAIK it can't even read them), and why does it block booting? Also, is there a way to work around this from the linux command line, and not have to boot back to win (I don't care about corrupting the windows install or losing data over there in this case)?
Can you give us any more info from the logs, maybe cut & paste?
Is the Windows partition listed at all in /etc/fstab?
Here is the fstab (only 2), and I think this must be the relevant part of the log. Prior to this snippet its startup as usual, afterword its a bunch of xxx service stopping and then end.
i'm curious, i would comment out anything ntfs related in /etc/fstab and retry the experiment.
(my nexus-7 mounts as mtp ?).
i've had problems with thumbdrives/sdcards not being plugged in and fedora would thow a fit while booting. not sure why fedora is so sensitive with removable drives.
The NTFS partition is in an unsafe state. Please resume and shutdown
Sep 15 12:25:46 localhost mount: Windows fully (no hibernation or fast restarting), or mount the volume
This is pretty common with windows 8 as it uses hibernation by default which often results in the message above on a Linux system, definitely not limited/specific to Fedora. Your fstab entry shows you are trying to mount the ntfs partition on boot and it is seen as being in an unsafe state due to the hibernation, not being shutdown properly and battery failure. You had to boot windows in recovery mode so there was definitely a problem there. Do they both boot now?
1) Windows was improperly shut down, this put the ntfs partition into an "unsafe" state. Linux will not mount ntfs partitions in an unsafe state.
2) The ntfs mount was placed in /etc/fstab without any "noauto" or "nofail" mount options. This tells the Linux OS that the ntfs mount is required for proper operation and it should not continue the boot process without it.
Because of #1, Linux refused to mount the ntfs partition. Because of #2, the fact that it couldn't mount the partition means that the boot process was halted so that you could fix the problem.
Booting back into Windows repaired the ntfs partition, which then allowed Linux to mount it and boot normally. Alternatively you could have added "noauto" or "nofail" to the mount options for the ntfs partition to tell Linux to continue booting normally if that partition is unmountable for whatever reason.
Based on his user name, it's a name he uses for his PC as well (based on /run/media/nexus... debian mounts my removable filesystems under /media/<username>).
This behaviour of systemd... I get what TobiSGD means in the linked thread about it meaning the system is not booted into an inconsistent state... however I'm guessing anaconda (fedora's installer) added it to /etc/fstab, in which case knowing it was an NTFS partition should have added the necessary flags.
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