[systemd-bugs] [Bug 85200] New: No way to repair root FS in emergency mode

[bugzilla-daemon at freedesktop.org]

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=85200

            Bug ID: 85200
           Summary: No way to repair root FS in emergency mode
           Product: systemd
           Version: unspecified
          Hardware: Other
                OS: All
            Status: NEW
          Severity: normal
          Priority: medium
         Component: general
          Assignee: systemd-bugs at lists.freedesktop.org
          Reporter: nalimilan at club.fr
        QA Contact: systemd-bugs at lists.freedesktop.org

My F20 system crashed twice last week (once because of a kernel bug, and the
second time because of a broken battery), and each time it wouldn't boot after
that because of errors on the ext4 root. I was granted with an emergency boot
screen like this:
http://foobaring.blogspot.fr/2014/01/howto-run-fsck-on-emergency-mode-on.html

The problem is, there's no (easy) way to run fsck on the unmounted root
partition to actually fix the errors. I had to create a Live USB and run fsck
manually from there. That's quite painful, and a non-technical user would be
completely stuck, thinking Linux is quite a fragile OS.

Apart from the blog post above, I've found other complaints or help requests
about this (and sometimes of course it triggers the usual rants about systemd,
which is a bit sad):
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/archive/index.php/t-299624.html (Fedora)
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=754340 (Debian, there's an
interesting discussion there about potential explanations/solutions)
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=697962 (Debian)
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=186201 (Arch)
http://bitsofmymind.com/2014/03/14/how-to-fix-fsck-your-root-file-system-that-you-have-to-boot-into-on-linux/
(Fedora)
http://forums.fedora-fr.org/viewtopic.php?id=62374 (Fedora, in French)

One common remark is that unmounting / does not work (at least not without a
trick). But beyond that, I think it would be very useful to offer a simple
option to repair the FS automatically, for users who would run 'fsck -y' anyway
(most users, probably).


(There's also the problem that when Plymouth is enabled, you don't see the fsck
error message, only the "Welcome to emergency mode", without any explanation of
why normal boot failed. And journalctl -xb does not contain any information
about that either.)

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