Re: Boot process is stuck with "A start job ... "

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From: Michael <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Reply-To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] Boot process is stuck with "A start job ... "
Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2026 22:15:18 +0100
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
In-Reply-To:
 <CAFvvX=bLRhK6EL731ySbhn5nEE-G9msidtLUC730RBDZPzDtVg@mail.gmail.com>
References:
 <CAFvvX=bLRhK6EL731ySbhn5nEE-G9msidtLUC730RBDZPzDtVg@mail.gmail.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0

On Wednesday, 17 June 2026 21:42:32 British Summer Time Mansour Al Akeel 
wrote:
> I am installing a new gentoo, with systemd. I have installed a kernel
> with the automatic process using "installkernel" which I will refer
> to kernel-dist. Then installed another kernel from "gentoo-sources".
> This is to be able to manually compile modules I need and optimize
> the kernel to my needs. The second manually installed kernel is
> kernel-6.18.35-r1.
> 
> When booting with the customized kernel, the boot process hangs with a
> message like:
> "A start job is running for /dev/disk/by-uuid/6008cf.... ".

What is partition is this?

How did you install the custom kernel?

Did you configure the root filesystem driver in the kernel, as opposed 
to having it as a module?

Is there an initrd for it?

How was the bootloader configured/updated?

It may help if you take a look here:

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:AMD64/Installation/Kernel


> I tried to wait for the process to end, but I took 36 minutes and was
> still running without showing what was happening.

It wasn't happening.  TBH, 36 seconds would have been more than enough 
to boot the whole system, let alone initialise and load a partition.  It 
seems the system was hanging because it couldn't load the block device 
it detected - perhaps a missing filesystem driver.


> Journalctrl and
> dmesg didn't give me anything relevant. When I boot with kernel-dist,
> everything works fine. Searching the web for an answer, I found
> others talking about fstab, and udev, which doesn't make sense to me
> because the other kernel can boot properly. So I thought some
> configuration missing from the customized kernel is the only
> conclusion. I just can't pin point the issue clearly so left with
> trail and error option which is time consuming.
> 
> Any idea what could be going wrong with the manually installed kernel
> or how to find the root cause ?
> By the way /etc/fstab is empty on my machine.

As far as I know when systemd-boot is used as a bootloader, then an 
fstab is not necessary, because systemd will check the GPT partition 
type to find out what each partition is used for.  However, I'm not 
particularly familiar with systemd and I do not use it with Gentoo.

If you changed the bootloader and did not create /etc/fstab, or systemd-
boot wasn't updated correctly to take account of the new kernel and 
initrd (if you are using an initrd), then this may have caused the 
problem you experienced at boot.

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