UM 24.04 does not boot after a power-off reset

[DaveHighland]

Earlier in the day, I was operating my touchscreen Lenovo Ideapad in tablet mode, so the keyboard was disabled. I closed the lid to put it to sleep. An hour later, I opened the lid, and the lock screen was displayed, but Onboard failed to pop-up, so I had no way to enter my password and unlock it.

So I held the power button down until it restarted. Then things went terribly wrong. The Lenovo splash screen appeared briefly, as normal. Then the screen below appeared, as normal, but the little green dots just kept cycling; the screen never prompted me to enter my disk encryption password:

After about a minute, the above screen was replaced by this one:

I selected the second option, "Ubuntu, with Linux 6.8.0-63-generic (recovery mode)".

A bunch of stuff scrolled by, ending with this screen:

As suggested, I entered the command, "cat /proc/cmdline", producing the output:

BOOT_IMAGE=/vmlinuz-6.8.0-63-generic root=/dev/mapper/vgubuntu--mate-root ro recovery nomodeset dis_ucode_ldr

But that means nothing to me; it's beyond my experience.

(About three weeks ago, I used Software Updater to upgrade on-line from UM 22.04 to UM 24.04, which went super smoothly, with one catch: every time that I configure Onboard to be displayed on the lock screen, the setting doesn't persist. Something changes it back. Haven't figured that one out, yet, but right now this boot problem tales priority.)

My guess is that something has gone wrong with recognizing that the SSD is encrypted via LUKS. That seems a reasonable assumption, since the screen output indicates that the root file system device was not found.

Unfortunately, I have zero experience with GRUB and troubleshooting boot problems, so any help with this will be greatly appreciated.

[Philippe]

Hi,

Quick instructions to an universal repair instructions from “initramfs” prompt

Fire’up your phone, connect it by USB to the pc, and share the internet connection by USB on the phone

At initramfs prompt, types:

ifconfig usb0 up

dhclient usb0

ping google.com # to check if connection OK

# repair system

sudo dpkg --configure -a && sudo apt update && sudo apt install -fy && sudo apt full-upgrade -y

If doesn’t work, I have another commands

[DaveHighland]

Thank you, Philippe.

It's not working. I connected my phone by USB, went into settings and enabled USB tethering, then tried the ifconfig usb0 up command. This message was printed on the screen:

ifconfig: SIOCGIFFLAGS: No such device

The tail end of dmesg indicates it's finding the phone (moto g power 5G - 2024):

but running ifconfig -a shows only two interfaces, and neither of them are the phone:

I tried running the dpkg --configure -a command anyway, and the terminal reported sh: dpkg: not found. If the boot-up isn't prompting me for my disk encryption password, and it reports that it cannot find the root file system device, then isn't it the case that all the packages used by apt are also not available?

[stephematician]

@DaveHighland

/dev/mapper/vgubuntu--mate-root

This does look like a LUKS issue; I think it is supposed to create a file (location) called /dev/mapper/vgubuntu--mate-root, which is where the Linux boot image will be.

You'd need to identify which device is supposed to be mapped, and then run cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/<device-to-map> vgubuntu--mate-root. I think!

I've never used encrypted boot because I'm too blasé about security on my personal device.

I also can't think of any reason why the suspend/hard reset caused the boot to fail.

[Philippe]

Here is a general fix from initramfs, another method, I use, reformated by chatgpt

Fix Broken Boot from initramfs Prompt (Ubuntu)

Fixing a Broken Boot Directly from (initramfs) Prompt (Ubuntu)

🧰 Requirements from (initramfs)

• Access to the system disk (not completely damaged)
• The issue often comes from a failed fsck or incorrect UUID

🔧 Steps

1. Identify the Root Partition Device

Run:

ls /dev

or

blkid

Look for your main disk, e.g., /dev/sda1, /dev/nvme0n1p2, etc.

2. Run fsck on the Root Partition

This is the most common cause for being dropped into initramfs.

fsck /dev/sdXn

Type y to all prompts.

Example:

fsck /dev/sda2

3. Reboot After Repair

If fsck completes without critical errors, run:

reboot

🧪 If fsck Is Not Enough: Check UUIDs

Sometimes GRUB or initramfs cannot find the root partition due to a wrong UUID.

blkid

Note the UUID of the root partition (the one with /).

Compare it with the one expected (often in kernel boot line, /etc/fstab, or /boot/grub/grub.cfg).

💡 Useful initramfs Commands

• cat /proc/cmdline – see how the kernel looks for root (e.g., root=UUID=...)
• mount – check which partitions are mounted
• dmesg – check for disk or initrd errors

[DaveHighland]

Thank you so much, @Philippe and @stephematician. Most of the commands suggested simply weren't there. And some, such as reboot, did nothing but return to the initramfs prompt.

I was also unable to get my phone connected to provide access to the internet, so in the
end I decided to make a clean start. I had backed up all of my home folder on Monday, and as this happened about 1:00 PM Tuesday, there was nothing critical lost.

I downloaded the UM 24.04.2 iso on another machine and put it on a USB stick. But the installation failed. The install dialog just vanished. Tried that again, same result.

I still had a USB stick with UM 22.04, so I installed that. Smooth, efficient, no worries. Then I used Software Updater to bring that version up-to-date. When it advised me that the software on my computer was up-to-date, I clicked on the button to upgrade on-line to UM 24.04. The on-line upgrade went smoothly.

I tweaked the desktop, restored my backed-up home directory, loaded a few programs that were lost (Inkscape, Brave, etc.), and everything is back to normal.

Well, almost normal. There's an annoying problem with Onboard. If I can't iron that out myself, I'll start another thread.

Again, thank you both so much for your help.

[jhonnmick]

Since standard recovery didn't help and internet access wasn't available for troubleshooting, the clean reinstall you opted for was a practical solution. In the future, consider backing up regularly and creating a bootable live USB with recovery tools, and to fix the Onboard issue persisting across boots, try using gsettings or editing the relevant dconf settings manually for the lock screen input method.

[Bombilla]

Hi, @jhonnmick and welcome to the Ubuntu MATE Community!

[jymm]

I might also suggest getting a inexpensive USB keyboard and mouse for emergencies. That has saved me more than once.