Boot Taking Long Time, Stuck for All I Know

[carlarogers]

Booting Debian 10 vm as guest under VMware Fusion on MacOS. I have searched and not found much relevant information.

I am hoping you can help me figure out what is going on and whether there is anything I can or need to do besides wait.

Console looks like this for the last 30 minutes:

Based on the MacOS activity monitor, the vm seems to be doing something:

This vm has snapshots of the filesystems from other servers. Last I checked there are 10 million files listed in directories, a high fraction of them are hardlinks to shared inodes. I am guessing whatever is happening during this bootup is the result of a power outage, but I am not sure.

This vm has two drives, one is 1TB, the other is 600 GB.



UPDATE: Console now show this:

 

[sp331yi]

@carlarogers -- are you talking of AUXO ? Looks like a car locator.

 

[carlarogers]

auxo is the name of directory. I just made up the name. Nothing to do with cars

 

[furtom]

Looks like there was a loss of power. The system checked the disks on the first reboot and it seems to have checked out.

Don't know why you are in emergency mode now, but did you try to type exit to go into default mode as it says?

 

[carlarogers]

This webpage at VMWare includes instructions for resolving this problem. I followed the steps it suggested and that solved the problem. The fix took several hours to run.

VMware Knowledge Base

kb.vmware.com

 

[khedger]

Looks to me like fsck encountered an error. I'd check the logs that the messages call out, see if you can find anything wrong with the disks and then follow reboot instructions. You might also figure a way to boot without the fsck or the disks linked to the VM to see if they are the problem.

keith

 

[carlarogers]

Looks like there was a loss of power. The system checked the disks on the first reboot and it seems to have checked out.

Don't know why you are in emergency mode now, but did you try to type exit to go into default mode as it says?

Once I found the reference to this problem at VMWare, I rebooted, then interrupted the reboot to open the GNU GRUB Edit Menu. In there, I appended systemd.unit=emergency.target to the end of the line starting with linux. From there, resumed the boot that went immediately to emergency mode. At that point, still following the instructions from VMWare, I ran the commands:

:/# /bin/sh
:/# /bin/mount
:/# blkid

then ran
e2fsck -y /dev/sdb

That command ran for hours but when it was done, I rebooted and everything is ok now.

That e2fsck command generated a TON of messages of things it was fixing. I figured whatever would be left afterward would be a mess, but everything seems perfect now that it is done.

 

[carlarogers]

Looks to me like fsck encountered an error. I'd check the logs that the messages call out, see if you can find anything wrong with the disks and then follow reboot instructions. You might also figure a way to boot without the fsck or the disks linked to the VM to see if they are the problem.

keith

I can't find the logs for the fsck. I tried syslog, but the stuff is not in there

 

[khedger]

I can't find the logs for the fsck. I tried syslog, but the stuff is not in there

I can't remember how to do it (I think it's a grub command or one of the options that comes up at boot time), but I'd try to find a way to not run fsck at boot time and see if it will at least boot up that way. It may not be in a good state, but at least it would seem to verify that it's fsck failing and you can then try to figure out why.....

keith

 

[wizardfromoz]

Just coming in on the end of this one after a roadtrip, but hope I can shed a little light.

fsck is the Linux equivalent of Windows chkdsk, not sure about Mac. It is a wrapper that identifies specific tools to analyze and repair disks.

e2fsck you won't find by itself, rather it is part of a suite of utilities under e2fsprogs, and that, in turn is one of the lynchpins underlying the GNOME Partition Editor, GParted.

I have to leave for my evening in Australia, but if I get a chance tomorrow I'll scout around, Carla.

dmesg might reveal something.

Cheers

Wizard