In one of my blog, where we recovered linux system from emergency mode using xfs_repair utility expectations was full recovery of system. However, we may encounter another error after where system will go in emergency mode again due to different reason. Again we may use journalctl utility to understand error message. For my case, three seperate partition failed with same error message as below.

While we may have different reasons behind this error message, like incorrect mounting or resizing of mentioned partitions, immediate short term work around is checking you /etc/fstab file to get info on listed mounted partition. For my system I had below partitions checked using lsblk command.

Here I can clearly see while home, tmp and root partiton are mounted to my virtual disk blocks via device mapper, problematic directories viz. var, log and cache are unmounted. To recover this problem we may try to remount these directories via mount, remount <directory name> utility, for my case again it didn’t work.

So for recovering system and boot it in normal mode, I commented out entries from /etc/fstab file for error partitions. In simple words, I am asking my linux OS to boot without taking in account mounting of mentioned partitions.

Once, edited entries and performing reboot, OS was able boot in normal mode with actual command prompt. Once OS boots and you login, you may further troubleshoot why partitions failed at first place, but these steps help you short term recovery of machine system itself.