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.
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)