Fedora: easy recovery from corrupt root partition

When you boot Fedora with a corruption which is not automatically repaired when systemd runs fsck -a then you are asked on the console if to enter single user mode, or if to continue. If you choose to enter single user mode then you'll find that you can't run fsck /dev/md0 as the root filesystem is mounted.

Dracut has a debugging mode with named breakpoints: it will boot up to the break-point, and then dracut will drop the console into a shell.

This is useful for solving a corrupted root filesystem, we can boot up to just before the disk is mounted, breakpoint into the Dracut shell, and then run fsck on the yet-to-be-mounted root filesystem. To do this temporarily add the Dracut breakpoint parameter

dracut.break=pre-mount

to the Linux kernel.

In Fedora you do can temporarily modify the Linux kernel parameters by pressing e at the Grub bootloader prompt, arrow-ing down to the "linux" command, adding the parameter to the end of that line, and pressing F10 to run the Grub command list you see on the screen.

Dracut will load the logical volumes, assemble any RAID, and then present a shell on the console. Say fsck /dev/md0 (or whereever /etc/fstab says your / filesytem lives) and then reboot. This is a world easier than booting from a CD or USB and working out which partitions are on what logical volumes, and which logical volumes are in which RAID devices.

Breakpoints are a very fine feature of Dracut and, as this blog posting shows, very useful for solving problems which appear during the early stages of booting the machine.