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I am having some non-critical but annoying issues on boot with my 15.04 system. In practice, after around 3-4 seconds the boot freezes reporting the following message:

New mount options do not match existing superblock

Now, people seem to have had similar problems, but mine seems different. In fact, I noticed that if I open the door of my DVD reader the boot proceeds normally. It doesn't seem to matter if there's actually anything in the drive or not.

Note: the boot hangs after I select to launch Ubuntu, it is not a boot priority issue. Also, Win7 on the same machine boots fine. I haven't tried anything yet, as I'm not sure where to put my hands if it is indeed a mount issue.

I have a Dell Precision M6700, with dual boot Ubuntu 15.04 and Win7, Quadro K4000M nVidia graphic card. Needless to say, I booted without problems for 2 years and had this problem only since a couple of days. The only noticeable system change as of lately is the installation of the CUDA drivers, but I cannot remember if this happened before or after the issue. I also don't know if it's relevant, due to the fact that the DVD drive mount seems to be at fault.

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  • When you boot successfully and close the drive, does the system attempt to mount something? Does it give any errors? Was the CUDA driver off a PPA or official repository?
    – crasic
    Nov 19, 2015 at 17:19
  • Not sure how to answer the first question. The LED blinks, but I do not see any trace of anything mounted (unless there is an actual disk inside the drive). Nothing in particular in /media/myusername/. No error launched. As for CUDA, I got them directly from the nVidia website, at developer.nvidia.com/cuda-downloads (installed from the downloaded .deb package.
    – Mikk
    Nov 19, 2015 at 17:23
  • Ok, I would try to see if sudo update-initramfs -u fixes anything. I would also clean the system of old kernels and drivers, update the kernel, and reinistall CUDA drivers. To me it sounds like a kernel configuration issue (expecting to mount a drive but failing and panicing)
    – crasic
    Nov 19, 2015 at 21:19
  • Have you tried to see if it boots eventually (It could stall and hang for 60-120 seconds and then keep booting)
    – crasic
    Nov 19, 2015 at 21:21
  • Didn't wait 120 secs, but definitely 60 and nothing was happening. I'm going to try your fix and report the results.
    – Mikk
    Nov 19, 2015 at 21:42

1 Answer 1

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When the kernel boots it runs in boot-time temporary file system that lives as a ramdisk known as initramfs or initrd, you can see the ramdisk images on your system in the folder /boot/.

This may be a particular quirk of your exact OS/driver configuration, but running sudo initramfs -u updates the most recent kernels boot image to include any changes to the boot environment since it was last generated. Typically when installing a driver package apt will run this for you if it needs it, but it appears that some package did not or otherwise the image was corrupted.

It is possible that the CUDA drivers get loaded early on in the kernel, and the Debian package provided failed to update the image, or some other driver/package introduced the issue.

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  • Just for the record, the issue is happening again, it seems to me every time Ubuntu gets its updates. Since I was going to move to 15.10 anyway, I'll just wipe the drive and do a fresh install.
    – Mikk
    Dec 3, 2015 at 14:10
  • @Mikk If that is the case it is likely a broken driver package that is not running the initramfs when its updated. You should post a question with your apt-get update output log to see if the broken package can be identified
    – crasic
    Dec 3, 2015 at 18:35

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