[Techtalk] still fedup after fedora upgrade

[Akkana Peck]

There are two possibilities:
1. It's dumping you into single user/rescue mode because something
   is going wrong during boot.
2. Rescue mode is the default boot stanza in grub.cfg.

If it's 1, you need to find what's going wrong:

Meryll Larkin writes:
> Haven't found anything in the logs yet that would indicate why it boots into
> rescue mode.
> In fact the boot log says:
>   Reached target system initialization
>   Starting Rescue shell
>  Reached Target Rescue Mode 
> (that was the last line)

Unfortunately, a lot of boot problems -- especially the kind that
tend to dump you into single-user mode -- don't write anything into
the logs. The only way to find out about them is to watch the boot
messages scrolling by. Often there's an error buried there somewhere
that can tell you why it's ending up in rescue mode.  On
Debian/Ubuntu, eliminating "splash" from the grub boot entries let
you see the boot messages; Fedora may be the same.

Unfortunately, it's still easy to miss boot messages because most
Linux distros have the annoying habit of clearing the screen just
before giving you a login prompt or shell, and disabling that is
hard (I haven't figured out how to disable it on Debian).

If that's the problem and you can't scroll back to read the boot
messages, try videoing the boot process with a digital camera.
You might see an error message in the video that isn't getting logged.

If there's no error message, then it might be 2, the grub configuration:

> But the ArchWiki confuses me and that scares me [ ... ]
> 1. My system is x86_64,  why am I writing "i386"?
> 2.  grub doesn't exist anymore.  Fedora 20 uses grub2

Before trying to blindly type grub commands intended for a different
distribution, I'd suggest taking a look at your current grub config.

I wasn't clear (maybe I missed it) whether grub is showing you a
boot menu with more than one option.

Have you looked yet at /boot/grub/grub.cfg ? That's the file that
grub actually uses when you're booting, and it's human readable.
It's even human editable, though changes you make there will get
overwritten when you run grub-install or when you update any package
that runs grub-install. If it's not showing you a menu, that might
be because the timeout in that file is configured to be too short.
So that's one thing to look for.

Then look for the boot entries.  grub.cfg tends to be long (at least
on Ubuntu) but look for lines that start with "menuentry". Those are
the various menu entries you see in the grub menu. Within each
entry, there's a line starting with "linux" that controls the boot
mode. If it has "recovery" or "single" in that line, that's the mode
it will use.

Then you need to figure out which one is the default.
Usually it's the first boot entry, but it might not be.
Somewhere earlier in the file there's probably a line like
set default="0"
that controls which of those menuentries is the default when you boot.

        ...Akkana