boot failure: "- Restore state"

[unhandyandy]

I've been running gentoo kernel 3.6.39-r4 happily for weeks. I had updated via "emerge -uND world" several times with no problem.

Then I
1) ran "emerge -uD world" (don't know if uND versus uD could matter here);
2) forgot to run revdep-rebuild (anything else I should do habitually after updating world?);
3) exited openbox (my desktop environment);
4) noticed the fonts were screwy (all sorts of bizarre characters)
5) tried to type in "sudo shutdown -h now" and I think I succeeded;
6) but the shutdown seemed to fail, not sure why since the messages were illegible;
7) pressed and held the power button till the machine died;
8.) on powering up again I get into grub and start the boot OK;
9) but after a few seconds the machine starts printing "- Restore state" continually ;
10) other messages occasionally flash by in the background but too fast to read;
11) I boot from the liveDVD and chroot into my hard drive;
12) I run revdep-rebuild and it reinstalls cairo;
13) I also run grub-install as suggested by someone on #gentoo;
14) same problem when I reboot;
15) back in liveDVD/chroot and I have absolutely no idea what to do next.

Googling "boot failure "restore state" turns up nothing useful.

On #gentoo someone else suggesting a hibernation/pm issue but this is a desktop machine, not a laptop, and I don't think I've pm is even active.

[eccerr0r]

Need more information, yeah at first I'm thinking you have suspend/hibernate/resume working on a desktop (I was elated when I got suspend/hibernate/resume working on my desktop, it definitely speeds up boot time on my really slow BIOS!) and the hibernate partition is corrupted.

Definitely should use -N when doing an update. I got bitten a few times when I didn't do this, but I think Portage will flag issues for you now, thanks Gentoo Devs :)

Key thing is how much of the boot process has it gone through, sounds like it probably got through kernel load, did init start? Did you see the OpenRC/Gentoo logo tag? Did it get past detecting your hard drives (though it's really fast for proper machines and kernels, should still be able to quickly see that since it does pause a second or so before continuing).

Did you update the kernel too or just packages? Updated your config files when updating to baselayout-2? When was the last time you emerged update world (just to get a guess of what packages got pulled in...)

You could also chroot to your harddisk and try to go ahead and revdep-rebuild to see if anything comes up, it's worth a shot if you can't tell what the error message is when trying to do a normal boot.

I'm also starting to get a bit leary of some really weird issues about Gentoo, and they turned out to be hardware issues... hope that's not the case here...
_________________
Intel Core i7 2700K/Radeon R7 250/24GB DDR3/256GB SSD
What am I supposed watching?

[unhandyandy]

[eccerr0r]

OK ruling out kernel, your kernel probably loaded just fine but not sure how far it got after that. You could try hitting ctrl-s or scroll lock to see if it will stop the spew enough so you can see what's printing.

Ruling out: upgrade from baselayout-1 since you say it's a new install.

Is it ALSA that's trying to restore state perhaps? hmm...can't think of much that saves/restores state between boots...
_________________
Intel Core i7 2700K/Radeon R7 250/24GB DDR3/256GB SSD
What am I supposed watching?

[unhandyandy]

[eccerr0r]

That got a chuckle out of me :) I really had to say that was an interesting stumper...

Great that you got it working again, and yes (intended as a pun) that would have caused the machine to pretty much get stuck on boot :)
_________________
Intel Core i7 2700K/Radeon R7 250/24GB DDR3/256GB SSD
What am I supposed watching?

[Goverp]

[eccerr0r]