While trying to move my computer to Debian, after allowing the installer to do it’s task, my machine will not boot.
Instead, I get a long string of text, as follows:
Could not retrieve perf counters (-19)
ACPI Warning: SystemIO range 0x00000000000000B00-0x0000000000000B08 conflicts withOpRegion 0x0000000000000B00-0x0000000000000B0F (\GSA1.SMBI) /20250404/utaddress-204)
usb: port power management may beunreliable
sd 10:0:0:0: [sdc] No Caching mode page found
sd 10:0:0:0: [sdc] Assuming drive cache: write through
amdgpu 0000:08:00.0 amdgpu: [drm] Failed to setup vendor infoframe on connector HDMI-A-1: -22
And the system eventually collapses into a shell, that I do not know how to use. It returns:
Gave up waiting for root file system device. Common problems:
- Boot args (cat /proc/cmdline)
- Check rootdelay= (did the system wait lomg enough?)
- Missing modules (cat /proc/modules; ls /dev)
Alert! /dev/sdb2 does not exist. Dropping to a shell!
The system has two disks mounted:
– an SSD, with the EFI, root, var, tmp and swap partition, for speeding up the overall system – an hdd, for /home
I had the system running on Mint until recently, so I know the system is sound, unless the SSD stopped working but then it is reasonable to expect it would no accept partitioning. Under Debian, it booted once and then stopped booting all together.
The installation I made was from a daily image, as I am/was aiming to put my machine on the testing branch, in order to have some sort of a rolling distro.
If anyone can offer some advice, it would be very much appreciated.
Sounds like your
/etc/fstabis wrong. You should be using UUID based mounting rather than/dev/sdXY. Very likely you’ll need to boot from a usb stick with a rescue image (the installer image should work), and fix up/etc/fstabusingblkidYou made me think that perhaps the BIOS/EFI is fudging something up. I checked and I had four separate entries pointing towards the SSD.
When you do fix it, the internet would appreciate a follow up comment on what you did to fix the problem
This gives a little bit of credence to the theory of an old installation taking precedence.
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Are there other EFI partitions around? Try booting explicitly from each one and see if you get different results
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Are there old bootloaders or entries from no longer existing installations lingering around on yor EFI drive? Move them from a live env to a backup or just delete them if you are confident.
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How about NVRAM? It’s a way for the OS to configure boot straight to your mobo; separate from any disks attached. It doesn’t look like it to me but perhaps it is possible your mobo is still trying to load stale OS from NVRAM config and your newest installation didnt touch it? Manually overriding boot in BIOS like above should root out this possibility.
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Do you happen to have any USB (or other) drives attached? Optical drive maybe? In the first text block kernel suggests it found ‘sdc’ device which, assuming you only have ssd and hdd plugged in and you haven’t used other drives in the system, should not exist. It’s likely your fstab is broken somehow, maybe a bug in daily image, but hard to tell for sure. Other possibility is that you still have remnants of Mint on EFI/whatever and it’s causing issues, but assuming you wiped the drives during installation that’s unlikely.
Busybox is pretty limited, so it might be better to start the system with a live-image on a USB and verify your /etc/fstab -file. It should look something like this (yours will have more lines, this is from a single-drive, single-partition host in my garage):
# / was on /dev/sda1 during installation UUID=e93ec6c1-8326-470a-956c-468565c35af9 / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1 # swap was on /dev/sda5 during installation UUID=19f7f728-962f-413c-a637-2929450fbb09 none swap sw 0 0If your fstab has things like /dev/sda1 instead of UUID it’s fine, but those entries are likely pointing to wrong devices. My current drive is /dev/sde instead of comments on fstab mentioning /dev/sda. With the live-image running you can get all the drives from the system running ‘lsblk’ and from there (or running ‘fdisk -l /dev/sdX’ as root, replace sdX with actual device) you can find out which partition should be mounted to what. Then run ‘blkid /dev/sdXN’ (again, replace sdXN with sda1 or whatever you have) and you’ll get UUID of that partition. Then edit fstab accordingly and reboot.
Changing
/etc/fstabonly won’t change anything if/can not be mounted. How would it pick up those changes? I think you are on the right track but missing the part with updating the initramfs.Rootfs location is passed via kernel parameter, for example my grub.cfg has “set root=‘hd4,msdos1’”. That’s used by kernel and initramfs to locate the root filesystem and once ‘actual’ init process starts it already has access to rootfs and thus access to fstab. Initramfs update doesn’t affect on this case, however verifying kernel boot parameters might be a good idea.
Tbf he said he doesn’t know how to use the terminal, and he’ll need to use at least sudo, vim and cat plus the stuff you mentioned. A drive getting inserted into the disk order is probably the correct thing, I thought UUID was the default on new installs for that reason…
unless the SSD stopped working but then it is reasonable to expect it would no accept partitioning
This happened to me. It still showed up in kde’s partition manager (when I plugged the ssd into another computer), with the drive named as an error code.
Since you dont know what’s happening you dont need to be fucking around with busybox. Boot back into your usb install environment (was it the live system or netinst?) and see how fstab looks. Pasting it would be silly but I bet you can take a picture with your phone and post it itt.
What you’re looking for is drives mounted by dynamic device identifiers as opposed to uuids.
Like the other user said, you never know how quick a drive will report itself to the uefi and drives with big cache like ssds can have hundreds of operations in their queue before “say hi to the nice motherboard”.
If it turns out that your fstab is all fucked up, use ls -al /dev/disk/by-uuid to show you what th uuids are and fix your fstab on the system then reboot.
Don’t be afraid of the command line, breaking Linux is how you end up learning how to use it!
I haven’t done this tutorial but if that kind of thing helps you this one looks pretty good.
My best guess is you need to do something like:
(In the shell, one line at a time, enter runs the command)
mkdir /mnt/tmp mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/tmp nano /mnt/tmp/etc/fstabNano is a text editor that uses your whole terminal, so you will see the contents of /mnt/tmp/etc/fstab (the file that controls where disks are mounted) and replace ‘sdb’ with ‘sda’ on the line starting with /dev/sdb2. The bottom of nano’s screen shows you the keyboard shortcuts, I think Ctrl W will make it write the file, asking for confirmation of the filename, which should stay the same. Exit nano (Ctrl+x maybe?) then reboot with the command ‘reboot’
If you get any errors about access denied or permissions, run ‘sudo bash’ to get a shell with more power and try again.
Good luck!
What most likely happened is your disk order switched and, as others have mentioned, using /dev/sda1 or something similar to point to partitions is unstable and can’t be trusted. Once your system is back up, look up how to specify partitions in /etc/fstab using UUID (something like /dev/disks/by-uuid/xxxx-xxxxxxxxxx-xxxx instead of /dev/sda2)
I think everyone here has offered good advice, so I have nothing to add in that regard, but for the record, I fucked up a Debian
bookworminstall by doing a basicapt update && apt upgrade. The only “weird” software it had was Remmina, so I could remote into work; nothing particularly wild.I recognize that Debian is supposed to be bulletproof, but I can offer commiseration that it can be just as fallible as any other base distro.
Nothing that uses apt is remotely bullet-proof. It has gotten better but it is hardly difficult to break.
pacman is hard to break. APK 3 is even harder. The new moss package manager is designed to be hard to break but time will tell. APK is the best at the moment IMHO. In my view, apt is one of the most fragile.
Eh, I disagree with you on Pacman. It could be possible I was doing something stupid, but I’ve had Arch VMs where I didn’t open them for three months, and when I tried to update them I got a colossally messed up install.
I just made a new VM, as I really only need it when I need to make sure a package has the correct dependencies on Arch.
I can almost guarantee that the problem you encountered was an outdated archlinux-keyring that meant you did not have the GPG keys to validate the packages you were trying to install. It is an annoying problem that happens way too often on Arch. Things are not actually screwed up but it really looks that way if you do not know what you are looking at. One line fix if you know what to do.
It was my biggest gripe when I used Arch. I did not run into it much as I updated often but it always struck me as a really major flaw.
Congrats, you found the only debian that breaks regularly: testing
You can file a bug report and then install something that does not require you to debug early boot issues, like debian 13 or if you really want a rolling release arch or tubleweed.
Can you reinstall? If possible, use the whole disk (no dual booting and bootloader to deal with).
I can, already done before coming here and I risk I’m going to do it again because people are telling me to do this and that and I’m feeling way over my head.
But not in the mood to quit. Yet.
I’m running a clean machine. No secondary OS. The only thing more “unusual” that I am doing is partitioning for different parts of the system to exist separately and putting /home on a disk all to itself.
Once time I’ve had two bad installs in a row, it was due to my install media.
Many install media tools have an image checker (check-sum) step, which is meant to prevent this.
But corrupt downloads and corrupt writes to the USB key can happen.
In my case, I think it turned out that my USB key was slowly dying.
If I recall, I got very unlucky that it behaved during the checksums, but didn’t behave during the installs. (Or maybe I foolishly skipped a checksum step - I have been known to get impatient.)
I got a new USB key and then I was back on track.
I’m fairly confident at this point that the worst of my problems is to be found between the chair and the keyboard.
Just in case you end up with reinstallation, I’d suggest using stable release for installation. Then, if you want, you can upgrade that to testing (and have all the fun that comes with it) pretty easily. But if you want something more like rolling release, Debian testing isn’t really it as it updates in cycles just like the stable releases, it just has a bit newer (and potentially broken) versions until the current testing is frozen and eventually released as new stable and the cycle starts again. Sid (unstable) version is more like a rolling release, but that comes even more fun quirks than testing.
I’ve used all (stable/testing/unstable) as a daily driver at some point but today I don’t care about rolling releases nor bleeding edge versions of packages, I don’t have time nor interest anymore to tinker with my computers just for the sake of it. Things just need to work and stay out of my way and thus I’m running either Debian stable or Mint Debian edition. My gaming rig has Bazzite on it and it’s been fine so far but it’s pretty fresh installation so I can’t really tell how it works in the long run.
How is your /home disk plugged in?
Through a cable, to the onboard SATA ports…? But somehow I don’t think that was the answer you were expecting.
Yeah I was thinking you might be using a portable drive for home, which might not be detected early enough in the boot process to mount.
If you haven’t reinstalled yet, swapping the order of the SATA cables might change the order they are detected, so your home disk that was B to the installer will once again be B to the boot drive.
Why are you using multiple partitions ?
Linux is not like Windows where you can run programs on any partition or inserted media ; you can only run executables on the primary boot partition. Its therefore pointless IMO to have more than one partition (plus a swap partition).
Have you tried asking ChatGPT or Gemini ?
This is what Bing said :
Fixing “Gave up waiting for root device” error in Debian The error “Gave up waiting for root device” in Debian can be caused by missing modules or incorrect partition references. To fix this issue, you can follow these steps: Boot into a live session and list the UUIDs of all partitions using sudo blkid. Check the /etc/fstab file to ensure the correct UUID is listed for the root partition. If the UUID is missing or incorrect, replace it in the /etc/fstab file. If the error persists, you may need to rebuild the initramfs file by running sudo update-initramfs -u after installing the necessary modules with apt-get install lvm2 cryptsetup if you are using logical volumes. 1
These steps should help you resolve the boot error and restore your system’s functionality.
source :Ubuntu
Linux is not like Windows where you can run programs on any partition or inserted media ; you can only run executables on the primary boot partition. Its therefore pointless IMO to have more than one partition (plus a swap partition).
What are you on? You can run executables from any partition (filesystem) as long as it is not mounted with the
noexecmount option.
