Environment
- EC2/T2
- Ubuntu 18.04
I have several instances in this environment; all are built off the same Ubuntu AMI.
Sometimes, some instances get stuck on the boot console with a message "Press enter for maintenance (Or press CTRL-D to Continue)"
I tried shutting down, detaching the root vol, and attaching it to a running recovery workstation, to fsck the volume. fsck comes up clean, no matter how much I try to force recovery.
The syslog is old — no new log entries are added as of the most current boot attempt — perhaps because the box never actually boots.
I'm at a loss of what else to try.
I know the "EC2 Best Practice" is to throw away and redeploy the instance, and that's fine, but I want to figure out what's actually causing this because it has happened several times, sporadically, and I'd like to prevent it if at all possible.
Change AMIs?
Some other fsck-type fix to the root vol?
Something else?
Best Answer
I figured it out. I should have figured this out much, much sooner, now I'm kicking myself.
This node had a mount point defined in /etc/fstab, but no corresponding resource to mount. In this case, the resource was supposed to be an encrypted EBS volume.
Removing the mount definition in /etc/fstab OR adding the required volume to the EC2 instance fixed the problem.