Chapter 3. Why Won’t the System Boot? Solving Boot Problems

Of all the things that can go wrong with a Linux system, one of the most stressful might be a system that won’t boot. After all, if you can’t boot a system, it means any services it provides are completely down until you can fix it. What’s more, any data you need to retrieve might depend on your ability to get the system back up and running.

It turns out that a number of different problems can prevent a system from booting. To best troubleshoot why your computer won’t boot, this chapter will first describe the boot process. Once you understand the boot process, you can observe your own system and see at what point in the process it gets stuck. After describing the boot process, this ...

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