[viseztrance]

I ignored systemd because I thought it didn't affect me, as I only run linux (fedora) on my desktop, and hardly had any issues at that.

But recently, when I changed my fstab file to mount a drive at boot, I made a typo. My system wouldn't boot at all and it wouldn't even drop to a shell so I can chroot the file system like you would with init.d.

I thought that there's some arcane command I don't know about. But there wasn't. You're locked off, and expected to boot off something else to fix your system. Horrible.

Having this said, I honestly expected way more on the section about benefits to users.

[ajross]

> But recently, when I changed my fstab file to mount a drive at boot, I made a typo. My system wouldn't boot at all

I don't know exactly what went wrong in your case, but killing Unix systems by messing with fstab has been a rite of passage for more than four decades. Systemd certainly didn't invent that. Hell, I broke a chromebook not 48 hours ago messing with the boot setup.

But FWIW: managing a recovery image is, amusingly, not historically a job systemd has tried to take on. This is what your live image is for.

[viseztrance]

I've been using linux on my desktop for almost 20 years. This was the first time I couldn't get a shell to fix my problem.

[ATsch]

It sounds like what you ran into are the effects of the general trend of doing more in early boot, as https://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/separate-usr-i... elaborates on, which is independent of systemd

[viseztrance]

Thanks for sharing this.

[zaarn]

Atleast on Arch, Systemd should drop you into the Emergency shell if it cannot mount a device that isn't defined as optional. IIRC it might require a root password to be set, however.

Otherwise, edit the kernel commandline to add "systemd.unit=emergency.target" to the end, which triggers systemd to straight boot into this console without trying anything that it doesn't need to bring up the console.

[otterlicious]

Or if you're blocked by the root password prompt add `init=/bin/bash` and make your filesystem writable if necessary with `mount -oremount,rw /`

[zaarn]

This will block systemd however. The nice thing about the emergency shell is that you can use systemd things like trying to mount filesystems. And you can later isolate multi-user to continue the boot when you finished your fix. /bin/bash would be atleast useful to try to get a root password set.

[viseztrance]

It tried when the mounting failed, saying it would drop me to a shell and then said "it fail to open up a shell".

[zaarn]

That usually indicates something is very wrong and might need an init=/bin/bash instead, as a last resort, to find out why it couldn't open the shell (usually, because there is no root password or it couldn't find any shell binary to run).