Hi,
i am a bit frustrated right now, because my current system is fairly new, i installed opensuse tumbleweed 2 months ago after a hard disc failure (i had opensuse before). Last week i left my home for vacation and the last thing i did was running zypper dup and then shutdown the system. As i started the pc today, the system was not able to boot and just stops somewhere without showing anything useful. After two reboots i get the typical systemd information about started services and reached targets… but in the end a lot of fail to start.
I have no idea what is the problem here, is it a hard disc failure again? The kernel is 4.20.6 , i also tried the last working one 4.20.2 i think, but this also just stops at “starting modem manager”… no failures though, because it did not progress after that…
Switching to another console is not working, i just stays at the first one. But that is what i expected when even the login service failed to start.
I guess i have to buy a new hard disc and reinstall everything… again… if only i would have a way to find out what the problem was…
One of the installation media options listed on https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Linuxrc is upgrade=1 which can simplify “re”-installing. Quite possibly doing so would preserve the existing journal so that a cause for the failure might be discovered.
You may be able to boot installation media using the rescue selection, chroot into the installed system, then examine the journal:
journalctl -b -1 -e
Even before that you could try an almost normal boot, by using the e key at the grub menu to append a space and an S to the end of the line that begins with linux and probably ends with quiet. Successful boot in S mode provides no networking, but does provide journal access and the possibility to repair whatever is broken and does not require network access to do so.
I was not even able to boot the recovery mode. So i just reinstalled everything on a brand new hard disc, because in case of an hard disc failure i wanted to prevent having to touch the system again the near future. I just want the system to work.
The new system is running and i was able to access the data from the old disc without any problems and such was able to restore all my personal data and custom configuration files from both, the /home and the / partitions.
So it seems to me that the problem could be related to something else than a hard disc failure. Is there a way to access the journal on the disc from within the new system?
And what would be the best way to find out if the hard disc has any failures? Is there maybe a tool i ran use to check the hard disc overnight or something like that?