[SOLVED] How to fix broken home partition by fstransform?...

[LinDUX]

Wish everyone had a very nice and blessed Christmas despite anything else!

I did a research online and here Debian forum and found nothing related to this issue I ran into.

I'm still a noob but been using Buster every once in a while for a good while and, after reading some articles about xfs vs. ext4 file systems advantages and disadvantages, decided to give the latter a try for my /home partition, the only xfs file system in my DT Debian, all others being ext4.

I only read very good recommendations to use fstransform to do this job, so I installed it on a Ventoy Live USB MX-Linux with persistence and run it from there following the instructions by Tim Schürmann.

/home is on sda6 in my Debian system, so I entered:

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# fstransform /dev/sda6 ext4

It was done in less than two hours, with no error messages at all. I also checked its log files searching for key words like error or fail (using cat | grep), just in case. But nothing was found. So far so good!

Then I rebooted into my Buster, expecting the usual start up. But guess what, I got:

Timed out waiting for the device /dev/disk/by-uuid/...47649
Dependency failed for /home
Dependency failed for Local File Systems
...
You are in emergency mode...
...
Give root password for maintenance

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journalctl -xb | grep error

gives

kernel EXT4-fs (sda5): re-mounted. Opts: errors=remount-ro

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journalctl -xb | grep fail

gives several error lines related to home.mount dependency for /home failures, including

"failed with exit code 99"

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mount -a
mount: /home: can't find UUID=...47649

cat /etc/fstab shows (only relevant lines)

# / was on /dev/sda5 during installation
UUID=...8b53d / ext4 errrors=remount-ro 0 1

# /home was on /dev/sda6 during installation
UUID=...47649 /home xfs defaults 0 0

Afterwards using vi /etc/fstab I replaced xfs by ext4 but to no avail...

Btw sda6 is in a logical partition.

I did a

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# blkid | grep sda6

and the output was /dev/sda6: UUID=...31a1c), so it is different from what it is in /etc/fstab above.

I run

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# ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid | grep sda6

and confirmed it was the same UUID

I went ahead and edited the fstab file using vi and replaced the UUID number.

I also run

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lsblk -f | grep sda6
sda6 8:6 0 119.2G 0 part

and it shows no MOUNTPOINT.

And sda6 is not listed in df -h output

Although I think this fstransform issue is a minor hiccup, at this point I'm not sure what the next steps are:

1. Can I now safely run systemctl reboot and no harm will be caused to the Buster system?
2. Should I first run mount /dev/sda6 /home instead?
3. What about UUID=...8b53d / ext4 errrors=remount-ro 0 1 for /dev/sda5 during installation?... Is it anything I should pay attention to?

Any heads up deeply appreciated.

Thanks a lot!

[Head_on_a_Stick]

Correcting the UUID for /home in /etc/fstab should be enough.

[LinDUX]

I just did it and worked. Now back to business as usual...

Thank you!