Lately I rediscovered this rather nasty result after making an experimental system change involving a few lines in fstab that gave the OS a bad bellyache.
To make matters worse, recovery mode's screens were very odd & unresponsive, so:
Knowing which tools would vanquish the nuisance & having them in my pocket was just right for the best/quickest possible fix.
In the past I would have booted with a PartedMagic CD - used Gparted to assure there were no disk errors, and then directly edited fstab before rebooting.
Now I can do this better & faster, just because I have a USB stick made with Ventoy that has the PartedMagic ISO as well as about a dozen others & boots in just a wink compared with the old CD method.
BTW, Colinux posted a glowing review for Ventoy here:
Like I said - this method is quick & easy IF it applies to your situation:
- Start into PartedMagic;
- Use GParted to check & fix any disk errors (I always do all the partitions);
- Browse to etc/fstab & edit the line(s) showing as 'dirty', which often look like this at the end of the line(s) :
errors=remount-ro 0 1
But need to look like this:
defaults 0 2 - Shut down - reboot as normal & unless there is something even worse amiss then all should come around normally.
BTW:
When the OS tries to boot normally & if boot, /, home or other critical areas are marked as RO that usually sends the PC right into emergency mode - there are other scenarios, but this one is what I've seen the most often.
HTH someone here !!