Hello people. For the second time in a couple of weeks I’ve had my Bazzite install fail on me. The system (a Lenovo Legion Go) gets into an unbootable state (all images) and spits out the following message:
You are in emergency mode. After logging in, type "journactl -xb" to view system logs, "systemctl reboot" to reboot, or "exit" to continue bootup
Cannot open access to console, the root account is locked.
See sulogin(8) man page for more details.
Press Enter to continue.
Googling turned up this support page on the Bazzite docs but pressing “Enter” just repeats the above message. I can’t get to a prompt. Control-D does the same thing. I’ve checked the drive’s SMART status and it says healthy with no damaged sectors using a live distro.
What I was doing when it failed: Updated a Decky plugin and when it tried to reload the Steam client went into a boot loop, unable to load before crashing. I forced a shutdown and rebooted. I wasn’t messing with fstab or anything you might expect could cause a boot error.
I’m at a loss here. It’s a 4TB drive and I can’t keep re-installing the OS every couple of weeks. I’ve been running Bazzite without issue for the last 18 months and this issue just cropped up.
Sometimes when the system is rebooted the BIOS update screen pops up briefly at 0% complete, pauses for a few seconds and jumps to 100% before continuing to the boot process where it fails again. I’ve tried downgrading the BIOS, and updating the BIOS again in case there was an issue with the current release. I’m currently on the latest BIOS for the Go, 38WW.
If it matters, my Windows 11 to go drive in an external enclosure boots fine. Any help is appreciated.
Dont you have to login in first to run journactl -xb to see the log on what caused the error? But you are right we need to see the real error on what is the root cause of this..
How could the mount point break when I didn’t touch it? The Decky plugins I use are CSS Loader, Tabmaster, HLTB, SteamGridDB, ProtonDB Badges, and MangoPeel, none of which require root.
OK, I misunderstood what the guide was telling me to do and I have now reached a command prompt. I still can’t login though.
“System is booting up. Unprivileged users are not permitted to log in yet. Please come back later…Authentication failure”
Finally getting somewhere. Half the time I restart I can’t get to a command prompt. This last time I restarted I got a BTRFS IO error:
BTRFS: error (device nvme0n1p3 state A) in __btrfs_free-extent:3211: errno=-5 IO failure
BTRFS: error (device nvme0n1p3 state EA) in btrfs_run_delayed_refs:2160: errno=-5 IO failure
Strike what I said about hardware faults earlier. I’m getting checksum and IO errors on the BTRFS volume. I’m going to pursue an RMA on the drive.
As a followup, I tried SteamOS using this same drive and it eventually errored out and became unbootable in the exact same way. It’s definitely a hardware issue and I’ve replaced the drive.
Yeah, Lexar was pretty good about it and offered a full refund despite the drive being a year old. I’ve already replaced it and am just waiting for them to send the refund when they get the drive back.
Got another Lexar…what are the chances of two failed drives?
I need something low power to keep temperatures in check and the model I had was very low power and ran quite cool so I’m taking a gamble on another one.
Hopefully isn’t not like an issue I’ve had. I’ve had two Crucial P5+ SSDs and both had the exact same issue (not your issue, the issue was that the drive would randomly go read-only, causing the OS to freak out). I believe it’s a hardware/firmware with that SSD series. I had a regular P5 and that worked fine though.
