SOLVED: A backup program set a binding hook into systems mount.

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TinyTim replied

Sep 17, 2023, 11:00 AM
Originally posted by TinyTim View Post

Backup program created a binding hook in the mount on boot, how do get rid of it? Two desktops with the exact problem. Installed the backup program but after learning that it made the computer dependent upon having a ext4 format drive inserted to shut down and boot. Uninstalled the program, it left the hooks. Do you know how to remove the bindings?

Kubuntu and Ubuntu 22.04 machines with same issue.

Here is the boot up error message.
( 13.098039) EXT4-fs (sdc1): VFS: Can't find ext4 filesystem
( 14.437082)
You are in emergency mode. After logging in type "Journalctl -xb"
to view
system logs. "systemctl reboot" to reboot "systemctl default" or "exit"
to boot into default mode.
(or press Control-D to continue):

Here is Kubuntu 22.04 fstab.
fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
# / was on /dev/sda5 during installation
UUID=8256fca0-2723-4e9a-bc64-ac669b1cdd7d / ext4 errors=remount-ro>
# /boot/efi was on /dev/sda2 during installation
UUID=A9EF-3FF7 /boot/efi vfat umask=0077 >
/swapfile none swap sw >
/dev/sda1 /mnt/SSD2 ext4 defaults >
/dev/sdg1 /media/unity/sdg1 ext4 defaults >

Machine will hang at boot, will not boot. Put a ext4 USB in, and it will boot, if not it eventually will go to error and try to repair/instruct. Same with shut down. Pulled readme file off of the root in the offending program giving details of the mount and bindings.

Tried using this fix, did not work.

Answer: *adding the "nofail" option to the fstab on the /dev/sdg1 fixed the problem.*
Note: uninstalled errant Timeshift (TeeJee) mount hook is still there, the "nofail" option is a effective "work around".

Here are some of the error msg. in "journalctl log"
- ACPI BIOS Warning (bug) : Optional FADT field Pm2ControlBlock
- pc1 0000:02;00.0: (Firmware Bug) : disabling VPD access (can***?
- device-mapper: core: CONFIG_IMA_DISABLE_HTABALE is disabled
-platform eisa-0: EISA Cannot allocate resource for mainboard
(which I guess is regarding a EISA card, there is only one ISA card that is a nvidia card)
*I will add more as I go.

Answer: There are two ext4 partitions on the systems SSD one with root system and the other for file storage ext4 called SSD2 @ /dev/sda1. Then the external USB ext4 drive sdg1. In fstab in the SSD2 @ /dev/sda1 has a entry that was out of viewing area and there was the hook > /mnt/sdg1 . That is the second user and why it insisted USB sdg1 be attached to boot, I have to assume was a Timeshift deal. I simply removed /mnt/sdg1 out of the /dev/sda1 SSD2 line, and it fixed the problem.
/dev/sda1 /mnt/SSD1 ext4 defaults 00 > */mnt/sdg1*
/dev/sdg1 ***UUID*** /mnt/sdg1 ext4 default 00

Last edited by TinyTim; Sep 17, 2023, 11:05 AM.
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jglen490 replied

Sep 17, 2023, 07:41 AM
TinyTim Lessons learned are always good! That being said, I've used up a tremendous amount of good in my Linux journey of 25 years or so

One big lesson for me has been that research and learning how to fix stuff is worthwhile, but sometimes the best thing is to copy your valuable personal stuff to an external location, and just do a clean reinstall. You may not learn much from that, but it will save you some aggravation.

I've always heard that Timeshift can be a difficult app to understand and maintain. In my journey through Mint Linux a few years ago, Timeshift was the almost daily subject on the forums. Again, when it worked, it worked great. It didn't always work great.

I'm not going to tell you what to do WRT Timeshift, but in my experience having the ability to recover some or all of my valuable personal data is far more important than having a restore point for my OS or apps. I use rsync on the command line in konsole, and it works well for me. I have several external backup drives in enclosures that attach via USB. When I do a backup, I copy a command string for that specific external drive from a text file and paste it into the command line. I label each drive with its unique name, and apply a date label when the backup is complete. I do a complete backup of everything in my /home and my /opt directories. I have rarely needed to recover any data, but when I do it's a lifesaver.

Best of luck and best wishes in your Linux journey
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TinyTim replied

Sep 16, 2023, 01:15 AM
Originally posted by jlittle View Post

Those two lines are definitely not good and should not be there in that form (fstab entries should use LABEL= or UUID= ; I suggest reading the fstab man page.) However I don't think they can cause your trouble.

A reinstall of grub might clean up your boot, overwriting the mess the mysterion has caused. You may have to do that while booted from a Live USB; just ask if you don't know how.

Assuming UEFI, the utility efibootmgr might be useful; it can show the boot variables in non-volatile RAM. A normal boot is the UEFI reads the boot variables, which point to /boot/efi/EFI/ubuntu/grub.cfg, which points to /boot/grub/grub.cfg. I'd look at each of the NVRAM boot variables and the grub.cfg files, looking for evidence.

Maybe I should start at beginning. I tried to create a UUID. Uninstalled Timeshift, formatted the USB drive, gave it a UUID. I spent about 15 hours on this. Only to come back and find this UUID missing from the fstab. I probably did something. The more I study this, the more I think that it was me and not TImeshift. I will consider all your advice here for sure. But let me ask you this, when you chmod and chown, is it directed are both pointed at the mount point or the /dev/drive? And at any time is there a reason to unmount during the process's? appreciate your interest.
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GreyGeek replied

Sep 15, 2023, 10:58 AM
Originally posted by TinyTim View Post

-It is taking some time to get used to these things.

It usually does. Unlearning old knowledge and picking up the new takes time.
claydoh is giving you the pure gospel!

Back in 2016, when I was first learning to use BTRFS, I created a RAID setup using two drives, sda and sdb. Then I decided to experiment with a 3 drive RAID so I added a third drive. I assumed it would be added as sdc. I was stunned when, after I rebooted, I saw it mounted as sdb. I thought my RAID setup was broken, but upon examination I found that it was not. What was broken was some of my scripts in which I called drives using /dev/sdX. From that time on I've always used the UUID to mount drives. I thought that using the UUID would be a PITA, but it wasn't. It took just getting used to.

The listing of "/dev/disk" shows several ways to identify disks:

Code:

$ vdir /dev/disk total 0 drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 240 Sep 15 10:50 by-diskseq drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 320 Sep 15 10:50 by-id drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 60 Sep 15 10:50 by-label drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 120 Sep 15 10:50 by-partuuid drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 240 Sep 15 10:50 by-path drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 120 Sep 15 10:50 by-uuid

The one dealing with "by-uuid" gives, for me, the following:

Code:

$ vdir /dev/disk/by-uuid total 0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 15 Sep 15 10:50 24101519-2287-4ec5-8ed9-1aef917d40e6 -> ../../nvme0n1p1 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Sep 15 10:50 7897-49D1 -> ../../sda1 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Sep 15 10:50 8031d05e-03c9-4012-ab07-89ef71983232 -> ../../sda3 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Sep 15 10:50 848ac299-0eb7-46bb-8551-2294015ae797 -> ../../sda2

The one "by-path" gives

Code:

$ vdir /dev/disk/by-path [FONT=Courier New]total 0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Sep 15 10:50 pci-0000:00:0e.0-pci-10000:e0:17.0-ata-2 -> ../../sda lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Sep 15 10:50 pci-0000:00:0e.0-pci-10000:e0:17.0-ata-2.0 -> ../../sda lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Sep 15 10:50 pci-0000:00:0e.0-pci-10000:e0:17.0-ata-2.0-part1 -> ../../sda1 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Sep 15 10:50 pci-0000:00:0e.0-pci-10000:e0:17.0-ata-2.0-part2 -> ../../sda2 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Sep 15 10:50 pci-0000:00:0e.0-pci-10000:e0:17.0-ata-2.0-part3 -> ../../sda3 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Sep 15 10:50 pci-0000:00:0e.0-pci-10000:e0:17.0-ata-2-part1 -> ../../sda1 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Sep 15 10:50 pci-0000:00:0e.0-pci-10000:e0:17.0-ata-2-part2 -> ../../sda2 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Sep 15 10:50 pci-0000:00:0e.0-pci-10000:e0:17.0-ata-2-part3 -> ../../sda3 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 Sep 15 10:50 pci-0000:00:0e.0-pci-10000:e1:00.0-nvme-1 -> ../../nvme0n1 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 15 Sep 15 10:50 pci-0000:00:0e.0-pci-10000:e1:00.0-nvme-1-part1 -> ../../nvme0n1p1

Notice that the UUID is always 8 alphanumerics-4 alphanumerics-4-alphanumerics-4-alphanumerics-12alphanumerics. That is the part that is permanently attached to that drive until it is reformatted and given a new UUID. What the UUID links to, ../../sdX, can and does change, although not often and only when you are changing hardware configurations, like adding or removing hardware, of if a hardware malfunction occurs. I know of no way the user can edit that information except through reformatting drives.

The UUID is NOT the same as the Disk Identifier listed by fdisk.

The "by-label" uses the label assigned to disk or disk partition by the user when it is being formatted. Be careful with this one.You can give two different drives the same label. I gave my external 500GB Crucial drive the label "BACKUP", and also labeled my internal 1TB NvME drive the same label. When I used the mount command "mount /dev/by-label/BACKUP /backup" while both were attached it mounted the first drive listed, NvME to /backup and the Crucial drive to /media/jerry/BACKUP.

Both drives got mounted. When I did the "btrfs -p send .... | btrfs /backup" command it sent a snapshot to both. That taught me to be careful with my use of labels during formatting AND when plugging devices in that have the same label.

Software which uses "by-path" to mount my NvME would use "pci-0000:00:0e.0-pci-10000:e1:00.0-nvme-1-part1" to mount that subvolume on my system. However, I never use "by-path", or any other mounting forms except by-uuid.
Last edited by GreyGeek; Sep 15, 2023, 11:03 AM.
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claydoh replied

Sep 15, 2023, 08:27 AM
for fstab, the line for /dev/sdg1 will become:

Code:

UUID=4d306f50-d941-4866-95dd-c02fe1f2c6eb ext4 [or whatever format you have used] /media/unity/sdg1 defaults 0 0

You are basically swapping "UUID=[some long string]" to replace the '/dev/sdg1'
You can keep the 'nofail' option, which doesn't hurt anything

You will need to do this on both your Ubuntu and Kubuntu installs.

If you don't use an fstab entry for the partition, you can always just click on it's entry in Dolphin, and also use KDE's automount options to do this automatically if desired, either when attaching it, or at login, if the device is attached during bootup (say, an internal drive, or an always-connected backup drive)
In this case, you don't need an fstab entry at all, if you don't want to have one. The fstab is useful for specifying an exact location for mounting, and other options.

Above, my internal drive, /dev/sda1 I have added a label to in Partition Manager, "Extra".
I Have it set to mount on login and attach, with other options disabled, as I don't want to automount any external drives, or anything else at the moment.
(I used these above options for an external USB backup drive when I used one in the past)

Now, another important thing to note with Linux file systems - like ext4. You have to deal with permissions and ownerships.
By default a newly created ext4 file system only has root/sudo permissions. You will have to change this for the mount point no matter if you use an fstab entry or automount.

You will need to chown the directory where it is mounted to that of your user account

sudo chown -R username:username /media/unity/sdg1 (change this as appropriate, if you change where you mount things)
if you have identical usernames in both Ubuntu and Kubuntu, there won't be any problems.
If you have different logins for each, THAT makes it a bit more complicated, and I can't off the bat recall the specifics to allow this on ext4.
NTFS or exfat won't have this problem, but also are not usable for many linuxy-things that expect ownerships and permissions.
Last edited by claydoh; Sep 15, 2023, 08:52 AM.
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TinyTim replied

Sep 15, 2023, 07:18 AM

Originally posted by claydoh View Post

You are digging too deep, even digging holes into empty space.

the nofail option in fstab tells the system to ignore any errors on mounting and to continue booting even if the device cannot be mounted properly at the time.
Timeshift has zero relevance to or effect on the Linux boot process.

That adding this to your mount options indicates that there is a problem with the drive, or the fstab entry is incorrect/invalid for the partition.

I bet/guess/postulate/predict that the problem is that there is no device assigned by the kernel as /dev/sdg, and that the nofail option added for /dev/sdg1 allows the boot process to continue.
Having a proper fstab entry using a unique ID for this partition will fix this, as I described earlier.

With all the relevant drives attacvhed, post the results of these two commands:

Code:

sudo blkid

then

Code:

lsblk

And we can give you the exact line you can use for both of your manually added mounts.

-It is taking some time to get used to these things. I can see irregularities in my learning process. Automount is not turned on in KDE, although everything auto mounted unless I formatted it myself, in that case, it would auto mount there after initial format. One thing I did use KDE Partition mgr to give the drive a UUID and now I see it on 'lsblk' but not in fstab. Now when I put that UUID in the fstab it will not boot on anything anywhere, it is dead in the water. (It is probable, being this is like my second time of formatting a USB ext4 and chown/chmod that I did something that Timeshift has never encountered)

Code:

sudo blkid
[sudo] password for unity:  
/dev/sdb4: LABEL="HP_RECOVERY" BLOCK_SIZE="512" UUID="9C50A5F050A5D0F6" TYPE="ntfs" PARTUUID="52a2d054-04"
/dev/sdb2: LABEL="MAIN DRIVE" BLOCK_SIZE="512" UUID="0E683B55683B3AB3" TYPE="ntfs" PARTUUID="52a2d054-02"
/dev/sdb5: LABEL="New Volume" BLOCK_SIZE="512" UUID="DA129EB3129E93DB" TYPE="ntfs" PARTUUID="52a2d054-05"
/dev/sdb1: LABEL="SYSTEM" BLOCK_SIZE="512" UUID="E0980FA0980F7476" TYPE="ntfs" PARTUUID="52a2d054-01"
/dev/sdg1: UUID="4d306f50-d941-4866-95dd-c02fe1f2c6eb" BLOCK_SIZE="4096" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="1ac09557-01"
/dev/sda2: UUID="A9EF-3FF7" BLOCK_SIZE="512" TYPE="vfat" PARTUUID="4eddab22-02"
/dev/sda5: UUID="8256fca0-2723-4e9a-bc64-ac669b1cdd7d" BLOCK_SIZE="4096" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="4eddab22-05"
/dev/sda1: LABEL="SSD2" UUID="92ba4f34-07f3-4c6a-9fd3-a45332b9286c" BLOCK_SIZE="4096" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="4eddab22-01"
/dev/loop1: TYPE="squashfs"
/dev/loop8: TYPE="squashfs"
/dev/loop6: TYPE="squashfs"
/dev/loop4: TYPE="squashfs"
/dev/loop11: TYPE="squashfs"
/dev/loop2: TYPE="squashfs"
/dev/loop0: TYPE="squashfs"
/dev/loop9: TYPE="squashfs"
/dev/loop7: TYPE="squashfs"
/dev/loop5: TYPE="squashfs"
/dev/loop3: TYPE="squashfs"
/dev/loop10: TYPE="squashfs"

Code:

sudo lsblk -f 
NAME   FSTYPE   FSVER LABEL       UUID                                 FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINTS
loop0  squashfs 4.0                                                          0   100% /snap/core22/864
loop1  squashfs 4.0                                                          0   100% /snap/bare/5
loop2  squashfs 4.0                                                          0   100% /snap/core20/1974
loop3  squashfs 4.0                                                          0   100% /snap/firefox/2987
loop4  squashfs 4.0                                                          0   100% /snap/core20/2015
loop5  squashfs 4.0                                                          0   100% /snap/firefox/3068
loop6  squashfs 4.0                                                          0   100% /snap/gnome-3-38-2004/143
loop7  squashfs 4.0                                                          0   100% /snap/gnome-42-2204/126
loop8  squashfs 4.0                                                          0   100% /snap/gtk-common-themes/1535
loop9  squashfs 4.0                                                          0   100% /snap/shortwave/83
loop10 squashfs 4.0                                                          0   100% /snap/snapd/19457
loop11 squashfs 4.0                                                          0   100% /snap/snapd/20092
sda                                                                                    
├─sda1 ext4     1.0   SSD2        92ba4f34-07f3-4c6a-9fd3-a45332b9286c  125.7G     8% /mnt/SSD2
├─sda2 vfat     FAT32             A9EF-3FF7                             505.9M     1% /boot/efi
├─sda3                                                                                
└─sda5 ext4     1.0               8256fca0-2723-4e9a-bc64-ac669b1cdd7d   46.6G    31% /var/snap/firefox/common/host-hunspell
                                                                                     /
sdb                                                                                    
├─sdb1 ntfs           SYSTEM      E0980FA0980F7476                       74.8M    25% /media/unity/SYSTEM
├─sdb2 ntfs           MAIN DRIVE  0E683B55683B3AB3                        1.2T    28% /media/unity/MAIN DRIVE
├─sdb3                                                                                
├─sdb4 ntfs           HP_RECOVERY 9C50A5F050A5D0F6                                    
└─sdb5 ntfs           New Volume  DA129EB3129E93DB                       97.6G     0% /media/unity/New Volume
sdc                                                                                    
sdd                                                                                    
sde                                                                                    
sdf                                                                                    
sdg                                                                                    
└─sdg1 ext4     1.0               4d306f50-d941-4866-95dd-c02fe1f2c6eb     93G    14% /media/unity/sdg1[/FONT]

Code:

/etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
# / was on /dev/sda5 during installation
UUID=8256fca0-2723-4e9a-bc64-ac669b1cdd7d   /                   ext4   errors=remount-ro   0 1
# /boot/efi was on /dev/sda2 during installation
UUID=A9EF-3FF7                              /boot/efi           vfat   umask=0077          0 1
/swapfile                                   none                swap   sw                  0 0
/dev/sda1                                   /mnt/SSD2           ext4   defaults            0 0
/dev/sdg1                                   /media/unity/sdg1   ext4   defaults            0 0

Last edited by Snowhog; Sep 15, 2023, 10:35 AM.

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SOLVED: A backup program set a binding hook into systems mount.

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