initramfs prompt
January 17, 2018 5:42 PM Subscribe
I think my usb operating system is having trouble mounting. Please help me fix it. Note: I don't know what I'm doing, so use small words please.
Background:
Hi! I'm in Nicaragua with a semi-functional computer. My 1.8" hard drive died while I was traveling, and those are hard to find, generally speaking. I might be able to get one eventually, but that's not the question at hand.
Right now, I have an install USB stick with Linux Mint 18.2 on it. I used that to install onto a physically small usb stick. So far so good. Then I updated to 18.3 and told it to do all the updates. Now when I go to load the installed version, it gets stuck at a prompt that says "initramfs." how do I get it to actually load instead of getting stuck at this prompt?
I'd really like to not have to wipe it and start all over again because that would be my third try (first time I tried installing to an SD card, which is apparently not a thing. Second time, my partner broke it in terminal somehow) and each try takes like a day, and since I obviously don't know what I'm doing, there's no guarantee that try #4 would be any different from this try. I'm hoping someone can walk me through some steps to fix this. But if there's some reason to think that the fourth time's a charm, I'm all ears.
I have read this and it is effectively gibberish to me.
Background:
Hi! I'm in Nicaragua with a semi-functional computer. My 1.8" hard drive died while I was traveling, and those are hard to find, generally speaking. I might be able to get one eventually, but that's not the question at hand.
Right now, I have an install USB stick with Linux Mint 18.2 on it. I used that to install onto a physically small usb stick. So far so good. Then I updated to 18.3 and told it to do all the updates. Now when I go to load the installed version, it gets stuck at a prompt that says "initramfs." how do I get it to actually load instead of getting stuck at this prompt?
I'd really like to not have to wipe it and start all over again because that would be my third try (first time I tried installing to an SD card, which is apparently not a thing. Second time, my partner broke it in terminal somehow) and each try takes like a day, and since I obviously don't know what I'm doing, there's no guarantee that try #4 would be any different from this try. I'm hoping someone can walk me through some steps to fix this. But if there's some reason to think that the fourth time's a charm, I'm all ears.
I have read this and it is effectively gibberish to me.
Response by poster: I told it "exit" and it told me it wanted a manual fsck. fsck -y got me nowhere new.
When I run gparted, "check" is a greyed-out option.
(I thought I mentioned something about a black screen and only a mouse displaying. Looked like the OS was there, it just wasn't doing anything and I didn't know how to fix it. So I deleted everything using "disks" and tried again)
posted by aniola at 7:31 PM on January 17, 2018
When I run gparted, "check" is a greyed-out option.
(I thought I mentioned something about a black screen and only a mouse displaying. Looked like the OS was there, it just wasn't doing anything and I didn't know how to fix it. So I deleted everything using "disks" and tried again)
posted by aniola at 7:31 PM on January 17, 2018
Best answer: Oh, shoot. I used angle brackets in my instructions and forgot that metafilter would think it was an attempt to use disallowed html and delete it.
Run "fsck [whatever partition it complained about] -y"
I would guess "check" was greyed out because the partition was already mounted. Can you right-click and "unmount" first?
posted by sibilatorix at 10:12 PM on January 17, 2018
Run "fsck [whatever partition it complained about] -y"
I would guess "check" was greyed out because the partition was already mounted. Can you right-click and "unmount" first?
posted by sibilatorix at 10:12 PM on January 17, 2018
Best answer: That is to say, when you exit it probably said something like "/dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-root: UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY; RUN fsck MANUALLY." so you would run "fsck /dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-root -y"
posted by sibilatorix at 10:14 PM on January 17, 2018
posted by sibilatorix at 10:14 PM on January 17, 2018
Best answer: If a solution can't be found here, I recommend the Linux Mint forum. Some knowledgeable and helpful folks hang around there.
posted by Too-Ticky at 2:56 AM on January 18, 2018
posted by Too-Ticky at 2:56 AM on January 18, 2018
Response by poster: We fixed it! It literally said FIXED several times. In case anyone else ever reads this, I then had to tell it "exit" again.
I am now headed over to the Linux Mint forum to find out how to get the installed OS to work as fast as the liveUSB.
posted by aniola at 5:17 AM on January 18, 2018 [2 favorites]
I am now headed over to the Linux Mint forum to find out how to get the installed OS to work as fast as the liveUSB.
posted by aniola at 5:17 AM on January 18, 2018 [2 favorites]
Response by poster: (Bonus points if anyone wants to explain to me what I did?)
posted by aniola at 5:33 AM on January 18, 2018
posted by aniola at 5:33 AM on January 18, 2018
Best answer: aniola -- sounds like after the update you had an unclean shutdown, or pulled out your usb stick unexpectedly, which left your filesystem (the disk partitions) in a damaged state. The simplest explanation is that your filesystem is made up out of two components, inodes (eye-nodes) and blocks. Blocks store data, and inodes store data about data (like, file X is contained in blocks A, B, and C). The inodes and blocks have to agree that they're related to each other, and what state they're in (like "in use" or "free"), which is what makes a "clean" filesystem. An unclean filesystem has those out of sync, and your system doesn't want to use it because it's afraid it might write over valid data or not be able to find things.
fsck (filesystem check) is there to fix that for you and make sure all your inodes and blocks agree, and all your directories have valid inodes -- and yep, it loudly proclaims FIXED on things it does fix. The -y flag tells it "just say yes to anything you are going to ask me about," otherwise it will prompt you y/n every time it finds something wrong. You might have a directory called /lost+found, which is where fsck will put bits of data it can't quite figure out which file they go with but it saved for you, just in case.
Booting up happens in multiple steps, each one basically knowing only enough to start the next step. Your BIOS doesn't know how to boot off an encrypted Linux filesystem, for example, but it knows enough to find a boot device and read the bootloader off of that, and the bootloader knows enough to load a very basic OS (out of your initramfs -- the "initial RAM filesystem" is so called because it's the initial filesystem the system knows about, and it's a big blob loaded up into RAM as opposed to being read off a disk device), and that basic OS contains all the device drivers and special information to load your "real" operating system. You wound up at the initramfs prompt, at that intermediary step, because it couldn't proceed to the next step without help (because the filesystem was unclean).
posted by sldownard at 7:23 AM on January 18, 2018 [1 favorite]
fsck (filesystem check) is there to fix that for you and make sure all your inodes and blocks agree, and all your directories have valid inodes -- and yep, it loudly proclaims FIXED on things it does fix. The -y flag tells it "just say yes to anything you are going to ask me about," otherwise it will prompt you y/n every time it finds something wrong. You might have a directory called /lost+found, which is where fsck will put bits of data it can't quite figure out which file they go with but it saved for you, just in case.
Booting up happens in multiple steps, each one basically knowing only enough to start the next step. Your BIOS doesn't know how to boot off an encrypted Linux filesystem, for example, but it knows enough to find a boot device and read the bootloader off of that, and the bootloader knows enough to load a very basic OS (out of your initramfs -- the "initial RAM filesystem" is so called because it's the initial filesystem the system knows about, and it's a big blob loaded up into RAM as opposed to being read off a disk device), and that basic OS contains all the device drivers and special information to load your "real" operating system. You wound up at the initramfs prompt, at that intermediary step, because it couldn't proceed to the next step without help (because the filesystem was unclean).
posted by sldownard at 7:23 AM on January 18, 2018 [1 favorite]
Best answer: how to get the installed OS to work as fast as the liveUSB
Won't happen. Live systems typically copy themselves to RAM and run from there, and that's always going to be faster than running from disk and way faster than running off something whose I/O speed is as fundamentally horrible as a typical USB thumb drive.
If you're going to be relying on running off a thumb drive and you don't want to spend your whole life sitting around waiting for it to do something - anything! - then you're better off with a distro like Puppy Linux that also runs fully in RAM and doesn't attempt to treat the thumb drive like a hard disk.
posted by flabdablet at 9:15 AM on January 18, 2018 [1 favorite]
Won't happen. Live systems typically copy themselves to RAM and run from there, and that's always going to be faster than running from disk and way faster than running off something whose I/O speed is as fundamentally horrible as a typical USB thumb drive.
If you're going to be relying on running off a thumb drive and you don't want to spend your whole life sitting around waiting for it to do something - anything! - then you're better off with a distro like Puppy Linux that also runs fully in RAM and doesn't attempt to treat the thumb drive like a hard disk.
posted by flabdablet at 9:15 AM on January 18, 2018 [1 favorite]
Response by poster: That sounds good... is it user-friendly? Which one do I use?
posted by aniola at 11:05 AM on January 18, 2018
posted by aniola at 11:05 AM on January 18, 2018
is it user-friendly?
That's one of its major design goals. I think it does a fairly decent job of achieving it.
Which one do I use?
If ever in doubt on this point with regard to just about any new-to-you piece of software, generally the 64-bit version (if available) of the latest release will be a good choice. For Puppy Linux, that's currently XenialPup64 7.5.
posted by flabdablet at 3:47 PM on January 18, 2018
That's one of its major design goals. I think it does a fairly decent job of achieving it.
Which one do I use?
If ever in doubt on this point with regard to just about any new-to-you piece of software, generally the 64-bit version (if available) of the latest release will be a good choice. For Puppy Linux, that's currently XenialPup64 7.5.
posted by flabdablet at 3:47 PM on January 18, 2018
Response by poster: Update for those of you following along at home and future readers.
Ok. So flabadablet sold me on the idea of using a live system, so I tried downloading puppy linux, and I couldn't use the keyboard to turn the brightness down on my screen, and it was giving me technical details that made no sense to me. It was not user-friendly enough for my tastes.
So sibilatorix looked into live systems with persistence for me, and said that at some point linux mint live usb sticks stopped having persistence and nobody's fixed it, but ubuntu still has live usbs with persistence (or they fixed whatever the bug was), so I'm giving that a try.
Something that was really helpful was telling me to use unetbootin (to install: sudo apt-get install unetbootin) to install, because it is a user-friendly program for installing what looks to me like pretty much any version of linux. Disks is the name of the program I used to empty out existing usb sticks.
posted by aniola at 9:05 AM on January 19, 2018
Ok. So flabadablet sold me on the idea of using a live system, so I tried downloading puppy linux, and I couldn't use the keyboard to turn the brightness down on my screen, and it was giving me technical details that made no sense to me. It was not user-friendly enough for my tastes.
So sibilatorix looked into live systems with persistence for me, and said that at some point linux mint live usb sticks stopped having persistence and nobody's fixed it, but ubuntu still has live usbs with persistence (or they fixed whatever the bug was), so I'm giving that a try.
Something that was really helpful was telling me to use unetbootin (to install: sudo apt-get install unetbootin) to install, because it is a user-friendly program for installing what looks to me like pretty much any version of linux. Disks is the name of the program I used to empty out existing usb sticks.
posted by aniola at 9:05 AM on January 19, 2018
Response by poster: went to share the followup over at the linux mint forums, and someone mentioned that windows users can do live linux mint with persistence
posted by aniola at 9:10 AM on January 19, 2018
posted by aniola at 9:10 AM on January 19, 2018
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This thread is closed to new comments.
The top answer here suggests that you run "exit" from the "initramfs" prompt to see if it complains about a bad partition, then you can run "fsck
Another answer recommends booting the LiveUSB system, opening gParted, right-clicking on the partition you installed linux to, and selecting "Check", which sounds like it will do basically the same thing as the previous method.
That said... hopefully someone more knowledgeable than I will offer an answer.
posted by sibilatorix at 6:59 PM on January 17, 2018