Bug#755581: systemd: emergency mode infinite loop after systemd upgrade

[Brian Julin]

I just went through this ordeal myself.  Here are some observations.

1) The problem causing the OP to enter emergency mode in the first place
is likely because systemd does not seem to (with current packages) want
to do anything with swap or non-root partitions that are referenced by
UUID in /etc/fstab.  Commenting out the /boot and it will likely boot, though
this will be less than helpful to people with separate /home or such.  You'll see failures
for dev-disk-by in journalctl -xb

2) If you run the recovery mode menu item from grub while this is happening,
and have "quiet" disabled, you get the same problem, with no login prompt.

3) If you enable "quiet" and run the recovery mode, you will get login prompts
within a minute or two.  You will get two login prompts running simultaneously.
Once you have provided a password to one of the prompts, the other will start
stealing every other character you type.  To get out of this you can type a sleep
command to the first shell by hitting enter after every character, then after
you have successfully put that shell to sleep, you can provide the password again
and get a mostly usable shell.  50/50 chance the shell will have echo on, so you
may not be able to see what you are typing.

So... definitely some failure-modes not covered for existing systems converting to systemd.

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