this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2025
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Somehow the EFI partition doesn't mount and it's impossible to troubleshoot via phone, she asked me to put back the old system 😞

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[–] krakenfury@lemmy.sdf.org 87 points 1 week ago (1 children)

How is /etc/fstab configured? Partitions should be assigned to mount points by UUID and not by their names (such as /dev/sda1). Names can easily change across boots.

Something to look into. Understand the frustrations here, but it looks like something that can be fixed if you are able to get to the machine and troubleshoot.

[–] knexcar@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

How the heck is mom supposed to know what an fstab is?

[–] krakenfury@lemmy.sdf.org 6 points 6 days ago
[–] sxan@midwest.social 68 points 1 week ago

I gave my dad one of my spare laptops four years ago; it had never had Windows on it (being from the halcyon days when Dell sold laptops with linux pre-installed), so I put Mint on it for him.

Early this year he called and said one of the keys stopped working so he'd bought a newer, used laptop and could I help him put Linux on it, because that's what he was used to. Over the phone, I helped him download and burn a new Mint image from his ancient desktop, and verbally walked him through switching the bios to boot from the USB, and through the Mint install menus.

Since then, he's called me once for technical support for getting his printer connected.

Dad's in his 80's and was a cop with an associate's degree; he's never claimed to be a brainiac. That is what convinced me Linux is ready for anyone, but that the choice of distribution is important. I think dad never upgrades or installs new software, but that's OK. I have to update and reboot every week because I'm stupidly loyal to Arch.

I'm sorry that your mom had a bad experience; that's super frustrating.

[–] nrab@sh.itjust.works 54 points 1 week ago

If the EFI partition truly was at fault, you wouldn’t get into Linux. And if the issue is mounting the efi partition after booting, that shouldn’t be a critical error. So it sounds like something else is at fault IMO

[–] tiramichu@sh.itjust.works 44 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

I switched my Dad to Linux recently, and set his account up without any superuser access. Updates have to wait until I visit once a week, but it restricts his ability to get himself stuck in any update-related tangles.

Linux has problems, but I'm so glad I don't have to support my Dad on Windows anymore, because that was far less predictable for me. Like the time it decided to upload all his files to onedrive (despite him having no knolwledge of this, or what it was doing or whether he'd consented or not) and made the Internet unusably slow for 8 hours by totally saturating his meagre connection.

He didn't even know about onedrive, just phoned me like "The Internet isn't working, what's wrong?" and of course onedrive is the last thing I'd have suspected for causing that symptom, which made it so annoying to diagnose.

Much nicer now his OS doesn't do sneaky things behind his back, or mine.

[–] sxan@midwest.social 20 points 1 week ago (1 children)

set his account up without any superuser access

Oh, revenge for when he had parental restrictions on the router and you couldn't get to teh pron, huh?

I like it.

[–] tiramichu@sh.itjust.works 13 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Hehe, you might think that!

In actuality though, I've always been the one who had to sort the tech stuff. We got our first family PC when I was 10, and I was the one who knew the most about it. We got the Internet when I was 13, and I was the one who had the passwords, and had to set it all up. Then when we got broadband, the router was actually in my room lol.

So yeah, I've always been the Admin, and Dad has always been the one who needed a limited account to protect him from himself.

[–] megopie@lemmy.blahaj.zone 20 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (4 children)

I had a colleague at work that had to redo several days of work because of the one drive thing.

The long and short of it is that they noticed that their connection was being super slow, opened up task manager to see if anything was eating bandwidth, saw one drive, went it it, correctly diagnosed that it was uploading files to it and eating up bandwidth, and then deleted all the files in one drive to stop it.

One drive decided that this meant they wanted all the local copies of the files deleted as well. Like, on the one hand, not the correct way to stop that behavior, but also like, the kind of thing a lot of people would try, and it then deleting all the local files in turn is an unintuitive outcome.

[–] tiramichu@sh.itjust.works 16 points 1 week ago

Yeah. When the cloud has more control over your own files than you do, that's not a feature, it's a problem.

[–] pitaya@lemmy.zip 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Google Photos pulled the same shit after it uploaded all of the my photos on my phone without permission. Eventually I tried to delete a bunch of pictures off the app, with the trashcan button... and soon realized that they were being erased from my actual phone storage as well. No warning, or indication that it would do so. Like wtf

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[–] altphoto@lemmy.today 43 points 1 week ago (3 children)

This EFI thing is literally squarely a Microsoft induced problem.

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[–] pyssla@quokk.au 32 points 1 week ago (1 children)

What distro did this happen on?

How long ago did you install it?

[–] Moonrise2473@lemmy.ml 30 points 1 week ago (4 children)
[–] anon5621@lemmy.ml 39 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Try silverblue or kinoite something immutable that will not break

[–] The_Grinch@hexbear.net 8 points 1 week ago

Or btrfs with snapper snapshots you can roll back to. Either way I suspect hard drive corruption. That's usually what it is for me (although I do lose power with abnormal frequency)

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[–] OhVenus_Baby@lemmy.ml 18 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Pop os wasn't the best distribution to start her on. It's new. Unstable and updates often. Linux mint, Debian, fedora.

[–] Hawke@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It's new. Unstable and updates often.

Are you thinking of some other distribution?

Pop! hasn’t released a new version since 2022 and rarely updates aside from security patches.

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wild

I've been off and on popos for like a 5 years and other than early issues with sound and Bluetooth, don't ever even think about

Are updates being done by the OS automatically or are you going into the terminal and running an apt-get upgrade periodically?

I've had issues when I do a terminal update because I believe that Pop expects you to do an apt-get dist-upgrade

[–] utopiah@lemmy.ml 25 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

Great example of why a safety net is required.

Yes hopefully the "base" setup works once you installed it, hopefully manage through some updates, some even tinkerings... but what happens when it break?

Windows (despite all the criticism, and I'm one of the first to complain about Microsoft the corporation) usually has been fallback mechanisms. It can usually rollback an update. It usually has a hidden recovery partition. It usually has an alternative medium to recover (e.g. USB stick, CD-ROM back in the days, etc).

So... you genuinely did try to help your mother but do not give up. Try instead to provide a better safety net so that she is genuinely safer. In fact I would recommend testing it together, make it a learning adventure. One way to do so would be to go there, help her fix it... then botcher the setup together! Delete system files, etc, then try again. Obviously the 1st step is insuring her own data (e.g. family photo, documents, etc) is safe.

While doing so, you might also want to setup up remote control, or not. Anyway a LOT of things to genuinely discover together.

IMHO if you do do it, she will not only appreciate the effort but assuming you do manage, she'll have a new sense of pride, both in you but also herself and share the experience with her friends. This in turn might bring more people in!

[–] LeLachs@lemmy.ml 19 points 1 week ago (2 children)

There also are distros with some kind of similar safety net. Immutable distros usually let you Boot previous versions if an update breaks something. This usually means that they need a lot of storage tho. https://itsfoss.com/immutable-linux-distros/

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[–] AllHailTheSheep@sh.itjust.works 10 points 1 week ago (3 children)

I find it's super rare any form of recovery actually works. best thing to do is pull the files you need off with a nvme/sata adapter then reinstall and replace those files. 90% when windows actually breaks there's not much to be done (I try all forms of recovery every time though).

plus, 9/10 times the reinstall process is actually way faster than fighting with windows or searching for the problem online and getting hundreds of people asking you to run sfc \scannow.

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[–] eager_eagle@lemmy.world 22 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

That happens when I select the wrong kernel in the systemd boot menu, before that screen. Doing nothing after an upgrade also selects the wrong version by default, it's kinda annoying. I have to select the most up to date version and press Ctrl-D to make it the default on the next boot.

If that's also what happens here, maybe a solution could be to keep only one kernel version and its fallback. But idk if you're using systemd-boot or grub

You might try using rEFInd instead.

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[–] Tehhund@lemmy.world 22 points 1 week ago (6 children)

Loool, all the people who are trying to help you troubleshoot are 1) probably correct and 2) completely missing the point. I have a Windows desktop, a Mac, and a Linux desktop at home and this kind of shit only happens on Linux these days.

[–] Ziglin@lemmy.world 13 points 1 week ago (2 children)

How am I the only one who does have annoying issues like this on Windows (except that Windows only gives a useless error code at most) while Linux has failed to boot a total of once (without me explicitly changing nvidia drivers).

[–] daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

System breaking errors that doesn't allow you to even login?

Windows have lots of issues, but it's been a while since I found those system breaking issues to be somehow common.

For all their shit, credit myst be given when credit is due. And windows it's become a really robust systems against layer 8 issues. Even powering off middle update is kind of easy to recover (I have to solve this issue for a user recently).

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[–] InFerNo@lemmy.ml 12 points 1 week ago (1 children)

You're right, this never happens on windows. It's so robust no one ever complains

/s

[–] lightnsfw@reddthat.com 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

People complain about all the invasive controlling bullshit Windows does. I haven't seen any kind of failure to boot issue with windows in a long time and I work in IT. Last thing I really remember being common in our organization was bitlocker getting triggered and people having to call in to get the key to unlock it, and that was back in the windows 7 days.

[–] freeman@sh.itjust.works 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Windows can boot and still be fucked. User can login and still be fucked.

Explorer crash and respawn loop. Taskbar not responding. Windows failing to update and still hogging every reboot. Networking settings get fucked up.

Also booting and even logging in does not mean a person can actually use his computer for his purposes. OneDrive deleting your work files from your laptop can fuck up a guy on the go.

Of course these people are not part of a bigger organization that managed their machines, just like OP's mom. If anything I would say your experiences in IT out you out of touch with most PC and even Windows users.

[–] lightnsfw@reddthat.com 1 points 3 days ago

I was specifically talking about boot errors. I acknowledged that people complain about other problems with window. Just saying that problems booting, especially with partition issues, is not typical and I had not seen one in a long time. That particular thing windows does fairly well.

There was a point in my career where I was working with 30-40 windows users a day on any and all issues they had but sure I don't have experience with them...

[–] iopq@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Literally happened updating just yesterday so I went to an older boot entry. The Matrix channel blamed my hardware, but the older revision boots just fine

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[–] someacnt@sh.itjust.works 16 points 1 week ago

RIP, this is sad day today

[–] Core_of_Arden@lemmy.ml 11 points 1 week ago

It's good your mom tried. It's sad she gave up so soon. I've helped 4 people switch in the past months. I've gotten even more people curious and more open to switch. A success is not only the switch, but that people start to realize that they can. In my opinion. :-)

[–] zdhzm2pgp@lemmy.ml 10 points 1 week ago

Really out of my depth here, but anywayβ€”

What model computer does your mom have? Does it by any chance have solid state drives that are RAID 0?

Have you tried Linux Mint? After really struggling with Fedora, I was able to get Mint up and running after a few minimal problems and haven't looked back since.

[–] 9488fcea02a9@sh.itjust.works 9 points 1 week ago (3 children)

At least your mom was cool enough to try. I had to trick my mom into using linux by putting a macOS themed, KDE, debian on an old macbook that was identical to her dead macbook

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[–] dinckelman@lemmy.world 9 points 1 week ago

Is this a Dell machine or something similar? It’s not impossible that the internal battery has run dry, and it reset the UEFI settings. A lot of setups would refuse to work if internal storage mode has switched from AHCI to hardware RAID

[–] rdri@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago

Could it be a dying SSD?

[–] MachineFab812@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Sounds like a hardware issue, so ...

[–] dis_honestfamiliar@lemmy.sdf.org 24 points 1 week ago (2 children)

This is every kernel update for me on Fedora. For some reason root is not set.

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[–] Moonrise2473@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Seems like only the EFI partition is missing. She told me "ls /home/her name" shows stuff but "ls /boot/efi" is empty

Apparently this happened by itself

I should have chosen something like silverblue but I wasn't familiar with that

[–] Lojcs@piefed.social 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

How does it even get into emergency mode without the efi partition?

[–] FauxLiving@lemmy.world 14 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

The EFI partition isn't missing or, you're right, it wouldn't boot at all.

If the /boot/efi isn't set to nofail in fstab then it failing to mount would dump them into emergency mode. This could also be cause by something simple like a syntax error in fstab.

It's also possible that there's a broken bootloader entry. For example, If the system was installed with LUKS encryption on the home directory and one of the boot entry doesn't have the luks module. The system would boot but everything after that would fail because it can't decrypt and mount /home.

The screenshot isn't useful, those BPF errors are likely a symptom of the original problem but they pushed the real error off screen. We'd need to see the output of journactl -xb in order to figure it out.

e: I forgot my unhelpful advice: Tell her to try Arch.

Its not so easy for a user to screw-up that partition. Same things that would do it in Linux would do it in Windows.

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