[Solved] Unable to boot (startup job is running)

Question

Hi there!
Today I went home and tried to boot my laptop there, but was unable to boot Arch.
Before I went home I did a system update using  ' sudo pacman -Syu '  and shut the laptop off normally. Right now I get the following message whilst booting:
" A startup job is running for dev-disk...25EFDCE0.device"
It fails after 1 min. 30s and shows a time out error for dependency /mnt/6776F38425EFDCE0, and refuses to boot. I waited for 5 min. but the only thing working at that stage is the shut down button (which appears to enter a normal shutdown mode).
Grub 2 is functioning; Windows 8 boots up fine (same HDD); though all options to boot arch fail because of the 'startup job error message'.
Do any of you know how I can fix this, or how to boot/fix arch such that I can attempt to fix it? Based on a search trough this forum it might be an error in FSTAB,  although all cases reported on this forum appear to boot normally after the 'a startup job is running 'error message'.
Many thanks.
Last edited by Simthadim (2014-10-11 09:43:36)

Answer 1

Thank you for your response.
Changing the UUID's to /dev/sdaX did not do it's magic, unfortunately. The ' a start job'  message is gone, the boot however gets stuck at
/dev/sda2 clean .... (beginning of boot)
Unfortunately I did not properly save the back-up of my fstab file, so the initial set up is lost. Was able to acces arch using alt+f2 and have restored it manually with
lsblk -f
It currently looks like this. I did have a line to automount my data partition (/dev/sda4, label: Data), but didn' t know how to restore that one as that line got deleted too.  My gut says this automount was causing the initial error, but it should boot up normally with the current fstab file, right?
# /etc/fstab: static file system information
# <file system> <dir> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
# /dev/sda2
UUID=47faa9c6-13d9-4d4f-8744-78766ea7c193 / ext4 rw,relatime,data=ordered 0 1
# /dev/sda3
UUID=bd14a274-a365-4511-9a11-151e086a42db none swap defaults 0 0
UUID=509F9EA61178387E /run/media/simon/Data ntfs auto 0 2