(top-posted due to the length of this thread)
Anyway you cut this, even if you get the problem fixed, you can no longer trust that this machine is sane.  You have suffered some kind of critical corruption, and who knows if you've corrected it or whether there is more undiscovered damage or loss.  The kernel modules had serious issues for most of the F34 life that caused unclean shutdowns to regularly occur, mostly in the i915 and systemd bits.  Is this system properly updated?  Laptops have a hard life, especially when the drive is bumped on the desk.  The best solution at this point is to thoroughly check your hardware for failing components, fix them, reinstall and recover what you need from backups.  Maybe moving up to a less complex storage system with built-in volume and raid management and dynamic error detection/correction (like btrfs or zfs) would also be a better move at this point.
--
John Mellor


On 2021-10-22 07:58, Roger Heflin wrote:
run "systemd-analyze critical-chain home.mount"   and it will show you the requirements.

I would suspect something going wrong with the activation of the home lv.

On boot up do a "lvs" post that info.  The Attr column will show if it is activated or not.

And if you find  a dependency not working run at "systemctl status " against it, and that should show you what error it got.

Is home its own lv or on the vg with root?  

On Thu, Oct 21, 2021 at 8:05 PM Dave Close <dave@compata.com> wrote:
I asked:

> Not sure how to title this issue but I'd appreciate advice. A laptop
> running F34 crashed last night and won't start properly since. The
> only errors I can see and find in the logs indicate some unknown
> issue mounting the /home filesystem. The system has /boot and an LVM
> partition with / and /home. / and /boot mount successfully but the
> startup drops to emergency mode. After I enter the root password,
> I can run "vgchange -a y; mount /home" and /home is immediately
> mounted successfully, no problem. I can then issue ^D and the boot
> seems to complete. However, the network is not started and no gettys
> are running on other PTYs.
>
> It seems apparent to me that there is no problem with the LVM partition
> or the /home filesystem. So I don't understand why startup is failing
> nor how to discover the true cause.

Roger Heflin answered:

> Since it is home, I would edit fstab and change "defaults" to
> "defaults,nofail" that will result in the system booting up if/when home is
> missing.   Then you can look at what is going on with home with the system
> booted and all tools.

Done, and that helps a lot. Thanks.

> systemctl status home.mount
>
> should tell you the error it things it got.

The error is "dependency". The trick seems to be discovering what that
dependency is. I've found a few minor problems and I think I've fixed
them but /home still doesn't mount during startup.

The strangest thing I've found is that the files
/etc/dbus-1/system.d/com.redhat.NewPrinterNotification.conf and
/etc/dbus-1/system.d/com.redhat.PrinterDriversInstaller.conf were both
empty. Without a network, I typed in what I see on another machine.

Currently, the only seemingly serious error I see is that zram0 swap
isn't starting. The swap LV is properly configured so this doesn't
seem that it should be a /home dependency.

I've currently reached a point where the network starts so my next task
will be to verify recently updated RPMs. Other ideas welcome.