Hello ALUG,

For a couple of weeks now I've been getting this problem on my Debian "unstable" laptop. I use LVM for the partitions on my HDD and I'm finding that, maybe three out of four boots, the partition where /home is mounted doesn't get activated.

It uses systemd for booting. The boot sequence continues as normal (AFACT) until after

[ OK ] Mounted /boot

Then it waits for a bit, then I see:

[****] A start job is running for dev-mapper-slab/x2dhome.device (42s / 1min 30s)

Then after the alloted time, it drops me into "emergency mode". I enter the root password and I can then get the logical volume for /home to mount:

# vgchange -ay slab

i.e. I set the slab volume group as active and all its logical volumes become active. I can also see from here that, while the other two logical volumes in my volume group are both

LV status available

(these are /dev/slab/root, where / is mounted, and /dev/slab/swap_1 which is where swap is), the /dev/slab/home logical volume is:

LV status NOT available

After I issue the vgchange command, I see the kernel message:

EXT4-fs (dm-2): mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. Opts: (null)

I can then exit "emergency mode" and booting proceeds to the login prompt. From then onwards everything is normal.

I've been looking for possible solutions to this and I've tried:

* adding lvmwait=/dev/mapper/slab-home to the kernel boot options. This didn't make any difference.

* checking the auto_activation_volume_list. At the moment it's undefined, which apparently means that any (all?) volumes can be auto-activated which sounds fine.

Any ideas what's going on here? I've been using this LVM set up since the laptop was new (so for 2.5 years) and I've not had this problem before. I tend to keep my packages fairly up-to-date by upgrading every week or so. I guess it's possible some recent upgrade has changed something, but I can't think what. And if it was something that affected lots of people, you'd expect the Web to have some evidence of that, and for there to be some fix on the way. I'm also slightly concerned by the intermittent nature of this (about three in four boots) that it could be a hardware fault.

Any thoughts?

Richard