boot hangs after starting enable remaining boot-time encrypted block devices [OK]

[Ian Lovett]

System Info:

ASUS X550LB
Linux Mint 17 Cinnamon

What happen!??!

This has happened to me twice and I have no idea how to fix it and can't find anything on the googlenets. The first time I fought with it for 8 hours. Finally I gave up and reinstalled the OS because I had to get back to work.

I am taking a wild guess that it has something to do with booting previously with plugged in and/or booted with a device plugged to USB / USB HUB.

My setup:

I have a USB HUB with a mouse, wireless keyboard, and external HD reader, -- The HD READER has a HD and usb port with wireless mouse receiver plugged in to that (to reach my standup station a few feet away). Pretty makeshift, but it did the trick without any problems for a couple weeks. Another guess is something to do with having previously inserted my iPhone and it is trying to boot that.

Attempts to Fix:

To try to fix the problem, I have tried different combinations of booting with and without the USB HUB inserted, and also with and without the HD plugged into the READER, and without the wireless mouse receiver plugged into the HD READER, etc.

Tried booting into safe mode and fixing dpkg, etc.

Tried with and without the iPhone.

Not sure what logs to look at for any hints as to why the device won't boot.

I tried installing "bootchart" and looking in /var/log/bootchart but there was nothing recorded there.

Please let me know what more information you need from me and I can paste the information here.

Thanks!

[Ian Lovett (ilovett)]

Since I posted this, I have re-installed Linux Mint 17 (but this time, XFCE 32-bit)

This time I tried never once plugging in my iPhone or external HD reader. I still have been using my USB HUB though.

Once again, it hangs on boot at "Starting enable remaining boot-time encrypted block devices [OK]"...

It was my first reboot in a long time, after suspending many times.

I waited a few minutes before hitting ctrl+alt+del and the boot managed to complete (previously it hadn't). The boot completed, but resolvcof appears to not have been started, and so while I may have a wifi connection, I couldn't google anything until I properly restarted resolve conf by running `sudo /etc/init.d/resolvconf restart`

[Ian Lovett (ilovett)]

attached a boot log

I've tried messing around with all of the USB / UEFI BIO settings.

I should also mention that my computer came with Windows 8 pre-installed, and I formatted the drive to be MBR rather than GPT... hopefully that is not causing the problem.

I'd like to know at least if this is a hard drive issue or usb issue.

Is there anything I can do to get more debugging information? I tried booting with nosplash debug --verbose but that didn't append anything to my log and I'm not sure how I could access that log.

I have also tried removing cryptdisk and cryptdisk-early from upstart by running

sudo update-rc.d -f cryptdisks remove
sudo update-rc.d -f cryptdisks-early remove

[Ian Lovett (ilovett)]

Attached output of "dmesg"

I think approximately where it was hung up when I pressed ctrl+alt+del to continue,

[ 24.171980] usb 1-6: USB disconnect, device number 3
[ 24.257417] EXT4-fs (sda6): re-mounted. Opts: errors=remount-ro
[ 61.018684] init: plymouth-upstart-bridge main process (262) killed by TERM signal
[ 61.025075] init: wait-for-state (rcplymouth-shutdown) main process (738) killed by TERM signal
[ 61.349070] init: plymouth-ready (startup) main process (261) terminated with status 143
[ 61.377996] init: mounted-tmp main process (689) terminated with status 143
[ 61.452171] init: failsafe main process (824) killed by TERM signal <--- here

[xl_cheese (xl-cheese)]

Did you ever find a fix? I'm having the exact same issue. It hang on boot and only sits while making a bunch of harddrive noise.

[xl_cheese (xl-cheese)]

Just like you were above, i did cntl alt delete after a period of time and it finally booted. And exactly like you I had to restart resolveconf to get an internet conection.

[Ian Lovett (ilovett)]

The last time I got this error I spent about a day hacking around with random settings trying to get it to work, and I apparently fixed it but unfortunately I have no idea what I did to fix it.

I think it might have something to do with HCI usb, I remember messing around with those settings but again not sure what I did, this was 2 months ago. I believe I disabled HCI usb, and it may have taken a couple reboots to resolve the issue.

Some good news is I at least have some hints for you, I had saved all the different commands I was messing around with. But I'm not sure if the actual fix was in here as I could have done it in different terminal / tab.

[Ian Lovett (ilovett)]

Here's the root commands I tried...

[kuLa (xhm-marcin)]

This bug is really annoying on AWS as it's forcing instance rebuild. Is there any way that boot seq can be broken on AWS?

[Marshall Sorenson (marshall-sorenson)]

I occasionally have this identical issue with Ubuntu when running it as a VirtualBox appliance. It happens when there is an fstab entry to mount a device on boot, but the device doesn't exist. I suppose there could be other possible issues, perhaps where the device name has changed for some reason, but essentially that is just as bad since mount is very picky.

In my case it happens when I have manually created an fstab entry to mount a shared folder (vboxfs), which has been removed from the virtual machine's settings or source folder deleted from the host machine.

To fix you must drop into recovery mode on boot, remount the root partition as read/write if necessary, edit fstab to fix or comment out the offending entry, save it and reboot.

I hope this helps you solve your problem guys, good luck!

[Johan Cockx (johan-sikanda)]

I had the same problem: boot hangs after "starting enable remaining boot-time encrypted block devices [OK]"

Triggeredby Marshall Sorenson's remarks, I checked /etc/fstab and found a duplicate entry (two lines trying to mount the same device) that I had accidentally added myself. After removing one of the entries, the boot process runs normally.

This confirms that the problem is probably related to a bad fstab configuration.

[Andrew Stebenne (ssonicblue)]

Had the same bug a few minutes ago. Running LM17 on an Acer C720.

Couldn't boot normally after several reboots, but was able to boot into recovery. After seeing here that an fstab issue might be causing the problem, I went into root shell from recovery mode and checked fstab. Nothing out of the ordinary. Rebooted, recovery mode again, this time picking fsck--got an error, which mentioned that I should run fsck manually. So I went -back- into the shell, and ran fsck on each partition manually from there.

I found that, for some reason, the most-recent-access-time on all my partitions had been set to 2078 (which, if I'm not mistaken, is the end of the Unix epoch?). fsck fixed that easily and I'm back to work!

Hope this helps someone. :)

[Michal Domzalski (michaldom)]

I had the same issue as mentioned here.
In my case it helped when I pressed an 'f' key after my booting hanged. This performed fsck on / , fixed errors and continued booting. No Internet connection problems reported.

[gdm85 (gdm85)]

In my case a wrong line (for /boot) was responsible; update-initramfs should *NOT* build without errors when fstab is not correct.

It is fragile in its current form, because it forces you to troubleshoot problems during a boot stage.

Furthermore, the error message is misleading "starting enable remaining boot-time encrypted block devices".

[niknah (hankin0)]

vboxfs was my problem too.

But in my case the vboxfs didn't get recompiled when the kernel was upgraded.
So I needed to install the additions again.

Added the noauto option in the fstab line and mount it in a later script so it doesn't cause the boot to get stuck.

[Malte Skoruppa (malte-countnumber)]

I also experienced this problem, at each and every boot. For me the
following line in /etc/fstab was the culprit:

UUID=B2BD-9FDE /data/shared vfat utf8,umask=007,gid=46 0 2

Somehow this line caused `mountall` to run `fsck.vfat` at each and
every boot, and so the boot process would always hang at "Starting
remaining boot-time encrypted block devices..." for about 5 minutes
before continuing as normal -- even though I made sure that the
partition was cleanly unmounted and that the dirty bit was *not* set!

I solved it by setting the <pass> value to 0, so that the partition is
never checked at all:

UUID=B2BD-9FDE /data/shared vfat utf8,umask=007,gid=46 0 0

Not ideal, but at least I can boot the system normally.

[DylanDerr (dylanderr)]

I hit "s" to skip to login and ran "fsck -n" which fixed it for me. (I had to hit "y" to accept deleting corrupt orphan linked lists then reboot)

[anarcha24 (anarcha24)]

i will add too, i used dylanderr method """"""""""""""""I hit "s" to skip to login and ran "fsck -n" which fixed it for me. (I had to hit "y" to accept deleting corrupt orphan linked lists then reboot)"""""""""""""""" also my problem is when i also tried to disable auto mounted on a hard drive, re enable and restarted everything works now

[Sergey Tryuber (stryuber)]

Thanks Guys!!! Exactly the same issue - hangs forever with "starting enable remaining boot-time encrypted block devices".

As it was mentioned here - I also was running my Kubuntu 14.4 for a long time with sleeps, but without reboots on Thinkpad T440p. Then I've restarted it with connected by USB phone (as a storage, not as MTP device). I don't fully remember, but most probably I've disconnected the phone during the reboot.

Ctrl+Alt+Del helped.

[Sergey Tryuber (stryuber)]

Ha-Ha, that's been fixed finally!!!!

rm -rf /tmp/*

In fact, after two months of leaving with half-working system, I found a solution at: https://askubuntu.com/questions/563051/ubuntu-14-04-boot-hangs-at-logo-after-updating

[Erics (stockman-eric)]

On my Mint17_3 system this was cured by commenting-out the Windows-line in fstab !
Mount Windows manualy now when needed .