Re: Problem with Ubuntu 22.04 failing to restart from NVME SSD, needs a power cycle

[Glenn Washburn]

On Tue, 23 Aug 2022 13:44:27 +0100
Chris Green <cl@isbd.net> wrote:

> On Tue, Aug 23, 2022 at 01:39:09AM -0500, Glenn Washburn wrote:
> > Hi Chris,
> > 
> > On Mon, 1 Aug 2022 14:41:14 +0100
> > Chris Green <cl@isbd.net> wrote:
> > 
> > > A year or two ago I got a lot of help from this list when I installed
> > > an NVME SSD on my system and, because it wasn't recognised by the BIOS
> > > I had to configure a slightly odd boot sequence to get it to work.
> > > 
> > > It has been working beautifully through two or three versions of
> > > [x]ubuntu until I recently upgraded from 21.10 to 22.04.
> > > 
> > > The system runs OK but it can't be restarted, I have to power down and
> > > power up again, then it boots OK.
> > > 
> > > If I wait for a while after a restart I see:-
> > > 
> > >     Gave up waiting for suspend/resume device
> > >     Common problems:
> > >        -Boot arge (cat /proc/cmdline)
> > >           - check rootdelay= (did the system wait long enough?)
> > >           - missing modules (cat /proc/modules; ls /dev)
> > > 
> > >     ALERT: UUID=2d6ff70c-1894-4afa-a35c-5abb40549d3b does not exist.
> > >     Dropping to a shell!
> > 
> > This is output most likely from your initrd, and almost certainly not
> > from GRUB. I'm wondering what kind of reboot you're doing. Are you sure
> > if a soft boot? Do you see any output from GRUB? It occurs to me that
> > you might be doing a kexec reboot, in which case GRUB is not even in
> > the picture. Regardless, you're either skipping GRUB or GRUB is working
> > enough to hand off to the Linux kernel. So this doesn't seem to be a
> > GRUB issue.
> > 
> Thanks for coming back to me, even though this looks like it isn't a
> GRUB issue.
> 
> Yes, I do see GRUB talking to me before the above message, I get the
> usual list of things that I can boot with older kernels, memtest, etc.
> 
> So it looks as if, for some reason, on restart/reboot initrd can't see
> the NVME drive. I.e. the kernel hasn't reset/restarted something
> necessary.

The fact that you see GRUB says to me that the firmware sees the drive
fine, assuming that GRUB is on the NVME drive.

I assume you're getting a linux shell right after "Dropping to a
shell!". In the shell do "lsmod" or "cat /proc/modules" and see if the
expected nvme modules are loaded. Look at dmesg for anything strange.
Most initrds don't have a decent way to scroll lots of text, so you
might try to save dmesg and module listing to a USB stick (if that
shows up).

You might try rebooting into a usb live linux distro and verify that
the drive doesn't show up and then debug from that environment which
will have a lot more tools available.

Glenn