Linux not booting…

For the first time in quite a few years, I had a boot problem in Linux. Turned on my laptop and it went to recovery mode.

My heart skipped a beat my mind went straight to the worst – dead drive!

So, I took a breath and went into recovery mode. Ran:

journalctl -xb

Went through the log and saw that it was just an issue with one partition on my second drive. Phew! That’s not so bad. Commented out the mount line in my fstab file and restarted to normal mode.

Once I booted up, I checked the second disk and found it was a corrupt partition table. Installed and ran testdisk, rewrote the partition table on the drive, reboot and missing partition restored. Some days I appreciate Linux and its tools.