I don’t know about others but for me the NUMBER ONE, sure fire way to max out my frustration is when I spend hours troubleshooting an issue only to discover it has fixed itself. It doesn’t matter if it’s hardware, software, network, WHATEVER! Intermittent issues are by far the worst.
Then consider, it’s not just computers. It’s also cars, engines, leaks in the roof or anywhere, noises that come and go at random, you name it.
T
You know how to start a good discussion.
I have a beauty right now.
I have a desktop with 2 HD’s sda and sdb
About once a fortnight, while booting, it gets right to the end of the boot sequence and tries to mount sdb4 when it should mount sda4.
I turn it off, boot again, and the problem is gone.
I have 4 linux versions on it, and all 4 do it.
I have no idea whether it is hardware, bios, gpt, grub or whatever.
It helps to share the frustration
Regards
Neville
Yep been there many, many, many times. It’s as if your computer is saying,
“I’ve had enough of doing that, not doing it any more today.”
You reboot or shutdown for the night, boot it up the following day and what you were trying to do the day before, after spending hours searching for a possible answer seems to work without knowing why it didn’t in the first place? These things are so annoying that I have come to the conclusion, that our Desktops, Laptops are being tampered with, by unseen people that are so small they live in the circuitry and from time to time waste our time searching or troubleshooting problems that we cannot workout the question why they cause these things to happen.
I call them the circuit people, a band of people that live in our computers to just piss us all off time after time. They even helped Cyndi Lauper write the actual song Time After Time, back in 1983 to give us a clue of what will happen in the future, when we all have computers.
and I thought I had problems!
Just keep plugging away
It is worth it in the end. With Linux you become more knowledgable and more self reliant.
Regards
Neville
Nice.
I call those incidents “X-Files”…
Especially when a co-worker calls for me with a “huge problem” and I arrive on the scene, it magically works again. Happened dozens of times.
Ironically happened to me several times too…
Yes, this is an old discussion thread, but I feel motivated to report that I have found a workaround to the above intermittent booting issue.
I modified /etc/fstab to use UUID for a partition instead of /dev/sda. Like this
# common partition - filesystem shared by several os's #/dev/sda4 /common ext4 rw 0 2 UUID=77cc1e80-1d2b-4139-b391-b1873de9cfed /common ext4 rw 0 2
You can see I have commented out the line with /dev/sda4 and replaced it with UUID=…
So what is it about the boot sequence that causes it to always find a partition given the UUID, but to fail intermittantly when given /dev/sda4 , sometimes finding /dev/sdb4 instead?
No idea, but if you want UUID’s you need to know about
ls /dev/disk/by-uuid 18ff162-b4c2-4e36-ab74-565888180b96 77cc1e80-1d2b-4139-b391-b1873de9cfed 209D-A900 7f1fdad2-e5f1-491c-818e-d375a5a40e49 274A-6A33 895f2f7d-978f-499e-b958-cba663f88121 290f439e-e6b2-4fa3-9a59-76cad959ae5c 9a73f9de-f25b-4cdb-b224-8e066602f67d 3f8094d0-3f09-46a7-95eb-0ada335fe5a1 bbbf6203-82ca-4cc9-9a45-44e17c8c5326 5909b5a8-491c-42bd-9fe8-55622bb79b48 c72e3a56-3729-494e-91d9-c73213969382 7226f0a0-268d-4db0-94d2-2e88eb77910c f17261d1-979f-497f-86f2-9a26c7433f95 7503c8ed-1453-4c43-9532-40696295ddeb f68ff5a8-c96b-402f-aa34-37c3c3680db7
It would be nice if they told me which was which.
Cheers
Neville
I cannot remember where but I had read long ago (last century) that it was best to us UUID in boot loader to avoid what you had experienced.
Very glad to hear you fixed it.
This was not in bootloader, just in /etc/fstab
By the time the boot gets to there, it is just about finished booting and finished with the initial ramfs, and is running Linux on the real filesystem. Why cant it find a device name? Beats me.
It doesn’t use names in boot files. It only uses machine/OS designations.