Is the grub in trouble?
this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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Important Edit
The information below applies to emergency mode boot when grub is intact but OS isn’t booting. It doesn’t apply to grub rescue. Sorry about that folks, I screwed up here and don’t wanna misinform.
—————-
Protip: If you see this error, press”e” on grub boot to edit your commands and add the following to the end of the kernel line in grub:
fsck.repair=yes
Then boot.
Fixes the issue like 90% of the time.
dd would like to have a word about that... But still, another tool in the arsenal is always useful.
Thanks for the tip.
Yeah, that’s the other 10%. 😂
Doing dd wrong or rm -rf on / aren’t gonna be salvaged this way, but if it’s a bad disk sector or somehow corrupted system file the above command will sort it out. You wouldn’t believe how many customers VMs I’ve had to use that on in the past when they were in a panic. It’s a 2 minute fix in most cases.
It’s kind of the Linux equivalent to Windows sfc/scannow, chkdsk, and dism restorehealth in one.
Why isnt it default?
It’s only needed is the OS isn’t booting. Running a repair every boot is not needed.
Why not adding some conditional to enable it? Like fsck.rescue = $grub-error. If grub-error = yes, then fsck.rescue = yes too and then try again. If keeps failing then show the message. Otherwise it keeps being no and boot as usual.
Oh, thanks for the info
Anytime I've seen this error is because I'm messing about with partitions, the last time was a few months ago when migrating to a larger disk, so I'm not too sure about those 90%.
In any case, sounds like a very helpful tip if the error just shows up out of the blue.
If it's going to grub rescue then that's before it can even get to the grub menu (thus no kernel line at this point). It's usually easiest to boot to live/rescue ISO and reinstall grub. Sometimes you can manually load grub modules from lib to manually boot from the grub rescue shell to the normal grub shell, but that's more advanced.
Not true, it’s grub rescue, appears after grub if the OS can’t boot. I’ve encountered this countless times at work over the years in customer environments.
This is false and there's a simple way to show it.
Remove the grub.cfg file and the system will boot to the grub prompt (not grub rescue). You can manually boot past this by inputting the Linux and initramfs lines.
Then test again but leave grub.cfg intact. Remove an important module like normal.mod and test booting - system will land at grub rescue instead of the normal grub prompt.
Once you test it would be good if you edit your posts so that you aren't sharing bad information with others
Well shit. You’re right, I’m mixing up grub rescue and emergency mode. Yeah, you would need a USB rescue disk to fix this most likely.
My bad, I’ll update the original comment to avoid confusion.
All good! Thanks for updating.
I remember my dad telling me a joke about FSCK and the reason it looks like a censored form of "FUCK" is because if you ever had to use it, you were basically fucked.
Personally, I had never had a problem with it. It just repaired errors on the disk or at least searched for them, IIRC. It's been a long ass time since I even heard the joke, let alone used the tool. This just reminded me of it.
I know it's a meme, but I've never had this happen to me. What causes this?
Usually anything where the BIOS can find and boot Grub itself but Grub can't finish the boot chain for whatever reason, like /boot being on a separate partition and your main partition gets corrupted or something
Bad boot config
Chances are you need to update grub.cfg
Touching yourself.
It isn't bad
However, I'm thankful for systemd boot
I never run into this. Mostly because I don't use grub
After having used Grub for about twenty years (eek) I was uncertain about the alternatives, but systemd-boot is absurdly better. Much better configuration, much better documentation, fixes a while pile of bugs that Grub team had as "won't fix" for years and years. No reason to ever go back.
I use rEFInd for the UI, and tbh, im not looking back either lol
Bailing out, you are on your own now. Good luck.
/$ _
I've only gotten that when I've mistyped the encryption password. They really should improve the handling of that.
cryptomount -a
insmod normal
normal
But yes, it's super annoying. Especially if you mistype it multiple times and you have to type that in multiple times.
In general if your OS is intact you can just boot into a live USB and chroot and reinstall grub, worst case scenario if you can't fix it in a less destructive way.
“Time to go to your backups”
I never ever knew what do do at that point. The only way I had to solve was to download a rescued cd and chroot...
if u updated your kernel check if there is still the old kernel name in the grub file