[SOLVED] Mageia Not Starting - systemctl dafault

[RoyD]

Hi All, I bet I caused this problem. I have question - if you intend to remove a drive should you go to MCC, etc and unmount the drive? I removed a couple of drives and now my PC will not start with or without them.
I get to the Systemctl default message.
So I have now got my PC with only one drive installed. with root , swap and home. Do these drives needs labels to work?
Is my menu.lst corrupted as it is presently empty?
Thanks Roy

PS If I need to rebuild my system (look at signature below) Can I just put the Mageia 2 disk and run and at some stage it will allow me me to not format /home???

[Ken-Bergen]

If the drives were not removed hot unmounting them is not necessary.

Your problem sounds like the boot loader was written to one of the drives you removed.

You could try an install using the DVD and choose Upgrade. Since there's nothing to upgrade it should only take a few minutes and at the end write the boot loader to the current drive.

[RoyD]

Tried the upgrade and it looked like it did the upgrade well except when it started it had the same problem. When I am at systemctl error and if I type my root password and then run startx It does seem to work but not as my user. I can see my user files in mcc, manage disks but not in dolphin.

[Ken-Bergen]

Is the /home partition mounted?
Please post the output of

Code: Select all

df

[RoyD]

Code: Select all

[root@localhost ~]# df
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
rootfs           12G  5.2G  6.3G  46% /
devtmpfs       1009M     0 1009M   0% /dev
tmpfs          1012M     0 1012M   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs          1012M  540K 1012M   1% /run
/dev/sda1        12G  5.2G  6.3G  46% /
tmpfs          1012M     0 1012M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/sda6       915G  150G  765G  17% /home
[root@localhost ~]#


[RoyD]

I have fixed the problem. My fstab was a little bit wrong as it still had drives that I had removed (physically) . So by using VI and learning how to use it all is good.

[Ken-Bergen]

I glad you solved it but the solution is strange.
It's been many years since having missing drives or partitions in /etc/fstab caused booting problems.

[RoyD]

Well I have all 4 drives back in and all is good, virtual machines working, backup system working, spare drive working, some adjustments of course. I am not at all a Linux guru but that is how I fixed it. Nothing else. Next time I decide to remove (physically)a drive or I will do it for fun I will unmount the drive first to see if that does not cause the problem. Funny enough I received my Linux magazine today and it had an article on fstab. Cheers Roy

[doktor5000]

It's been many years since having missing drives or partitions in /etc/fstab caused booting problems.

Not at all, systemd is quite picky in some areas: https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Mageia_2_Err ... t_in_fstab