Hi all,

I am having a strange new issue with the one of the raspberry pi 4b I have running at home. One of them failed/restarted for some reasons and it is now stuck at boot with the line:

Waiting for root device LABEL=writable…

I am booting this PI from USB. From what I can see the disk is ok. I can mount it on my laptop and access it correctly. The partition is labelled correctly. I tried to move it to another PI I have and I have the same error (I did this to remove the possibility it was the PI/USB port). I am pretty sure it is not the power that is the issue (since I am giving it more than enough).

All of this was working correctly until now (for months). Ubuntu may have updated something (my fault, I may not have disabled the auto-update) or something else could have broken.

I can try to point to the partition via UUID instead of the label, but something tells me that is not the issue. Did anybody encounter such an issue in the past or has any advice on how to debug it?

Thank you for your help and time.

  • Anafroj@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I believe it is something like that. Or it is not mounting the drive correctly and not finding it, or it is something else.

    Yes, that’s what I had in mind. I already had similar problems with initramfs, because it was responsible to load the drivers needed for mounting the disk where the kernel was, so a bad initramfs caused the boot to fail from the get go failing to mount the partition.

    That being said, I’ve looked at my Pi, and I have no idea what would serve as an initramfs in all those Pi specific files in /boot, if any. If you really want to understand what happened, I guess a possible path would be to find resources on the web explaining in details the Pi boot process, since it’s different from usual linux boot process (it’s not just the Pi either, I played with other ARM devices, like the stuff from pine64, and they all had their own way to boot).