If you happen to have a Raspberry Pi chances are that you have ran into it booting into emergency mode. Usually this happens when the Raspberry Pi is unable to boot up properly. Now there are many reasons why your Raspberry Pi may not be booting up. However some time back I ran into my own issues after the power flickered off and on our home and one of my Raspberry Pi’s no longer would boot up properly.

The dreaded “A start job is running for dev-sda1.device” and message. First off don’t panic, chances are that everything is fine. The issue is that your Raspberry Pi does not know what to boot up. Chances are that you have an external hard drive connected and it’s trying to boot from there. This is the reason you are unable to login.

The message: Welcome to emergency mode! After logging in, type “journalctl -xb” is simply a heads up that something happened. The system is then telling you to take a look at the journalctl with the -xb flags to see what actually happened. However it now becomes the point that we are unable to boot into our Raspberry Pi because it’s in emergency mode. As much has we want to continue to try and login with our credentials it keeps bouncing us back. We can try and try our Raspberry Pi credentials but unfortunately the Raspberry Pi cannot find the path to boot the Raspberry Pi. I mean, can you blame it?

Raspberry Pi Emergency mode? What happened?

Well there are certianly a few things that caused your Raspberry Pi to boot into Emergency Mode. Below are a few things that may have happened. If you had something else happen. Please leave a comment here.

• A switch in your utility box flipped.
• Lighting was striking in your area.
• A bad storm came through the area and effected a neighboring area causing a blip.
• A blackout occurred where there was an over consumption of power during a prime time.

All of the above can could have caused the misconfiguration. So the best we can do moving forward is try to fix it. Now I have written a step by step entry that will help you. Go to Fix a Raspberry Pi SD Card in Maintenance Mode on a Raspberry Pi keep in mind if you do not have a Raspberry Pi that’s quite alright, the article will still walk you through the FSTAB that may be causing this issue.

If you have comments please direct them to the article above.