SOLUTION BELOW

The actual bug

I have never been in a more confusing situation regarding Linux.

I have a Dell XPS 15 9560, which had a dual boot Windows 10 / EndeavourOS setup. It was running fine for months. 10 days ago I updated Linux and after restart it couldn’t boot anymore. It got stuck at “A start job is running for /dev/disk/by-uuid/…” (which is the root partition).

First, with the help of a friend of mine who is quite knowledgeable about Linux (he runs vanilla Arch, etc), we spent 5 hours trying to fix it but had no luck.

Then I decided to back up everything and do a fresh install. Aaaand the same error happened again on the first boot. Then I though “ok, probably some problem with Arch, lets try Fedora”. Nope. Some similar error about not finding the root partition. (Here I must say that the kernel which was shipped with the ISO was working fine, but after updating to the latest one, it failed.) Here I thought “ok, then it might be a problem with the latest kernel, let’s install EndeavourOS with the LTS kernel.” Nope, LTS kernel also didn’t boot. Then I tried Ubuntu and it worked, but that’s not solving the problem. Then I decided to put another nvme drive in the laptop and try there. The same error again.

Now the greatest part: If I put the nvme drive into an external usb case, EndeavourOS installs, updates, boots without any problem, no sign of the error.

So now I don’t know how to proceed… Maybe there is something wrong with the pcie port in my laptop, but except for the booting problem, windows is working, I can also mount and access every partition in the ssd through a live usb. So no other signs of problem with the port whatsoever.

I would be grateful for any advice as I’ve lost several days trying to solve this and I am out of ideas…

Solution: The last working kernels are from 11. August 2023 (both linux and linux-lts) linux-6.4.10.arch1-1 and linux-lts-6.1.45-1. You can download them from here: linux / linux-lts and install them with

sudo pacman -U the_path_to_the_package

Thank you all for the help!

  • IllecorsAEnglish
    11·
    10 months ago
    [root@EndeavourOS /]# blkid
/dev/nvme0n1p1: UUID=“6903-7FA3” BLOCK_SIZE=“512” TYPE=“vfat” PARTUUID=“86a0a714-815f-45db-ad0e-9eba16861903” /dev/nvme0n1p2: LABEL=“endeavouros” UUID=“9ae3c50f-be08-4594-ac30-2d094375868d” BLOCK_SIZE=“4096” TYPE=“ext4” PARTLABEL=“endeavouros” PARTUUID=“9b52162c-a4bf-4e5e-8096-bb7f144c481a”
/dev/loop0: BLOCK_SIZE=“1048576” TYPE=“squashfs”
/dev/sda2: SEC_TYPE=“msdos” LABEL_FATBOOT=“ARCHISO_EFI” LABEL=“ARCHISO_EFI” UUID=“6121-B369” BLOCK_SIZE=“512” TYPE=“vfat” PARTUUID=“1bdb3cc0-02”
/dev/sda1: BLOCK_SIZE=“2048” UUID=“2023-08-05-13-57-43-00” LABEL=“EOS_202308” TYPE=“iso9660” PARTUUID=“1bdb3cc0-01”

    [root@EndeavourOS /]# sudo cat /etc/fstab
/etc/fstab: static file system information.
Use ‘blkid’ to print the universally unique identifier for a device; this may
be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices that works even if
disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).

UUID=6903-7FA3 /efi vfat defaults,noatime 0 2
UUID=9ae3c50f-be08-4594-ac30-2d094375868d / ext4 defaults,noatime 0 1
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0

    I assume it should look like this