Bug#754340: Unable to run fsck manually when instructed to do so

[Bas Wijnen]

Package: systemd-sysv
Version: 204-14
Severity: critical
Justification: impossible to boot system

(The severity seems inflated, but it didn't fit any of the lower RC levels and
it should be RC IMO.  It is also pretty easy to fix, I hope, so I'd suggest
doing that instead of worrying about the proper severity.)

My system had some serious hard drive problems and because of that remounted my
root file system read-only.  Before investigating anything, I rebooted the
system to see if that would solve anything.

On reboot, fsck was run and it failed, telling me to run it manually.  Then it
provided me a shell.  So far so good.

However, fsck / failed because the filesystem was mounted read-write.  mount /
-o remount,ro failed because the filesystem was busy.  This being my only
computer at that moment, I did not have internet to look up how to do this in
systemd (which I'm guessing has a way to make remounting read-only work, but
I'm not familiar with it).

The only reason I was able to continue, was that after some trying it hit a bad
file and automatically remounted the filesystem read-only.  At that point, I
could run fsck and it would boot again, allowing me to proceed with diagnosing
the problem.

My suggested solution is to document the method for remounting the root
filesystem read-only (or the method for getting help on the commands that do
such things) in the error message that says fsck must be run manually, or
perhaps whenever a shell is spawned so early during boot.  This is essential to
be able to rescue the system, and since it's changed compared to how it worked
for decades, you can't assume that everyone knows how to do it.

This is even more important given systemd's dependency scheme which installs it
on machines where the owner isn't aware of it.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: jessie/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 3.14-1-686-pae (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages systemd-sysv depends on:
ii  systemd  204-14

systemd-sysv recommends no packages.

systemd-sysv suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information