System doesn't boot (fail to mount) and GRUB menu non existent for troubleshooting

Support and Troubleshooting
1

My system doesn’t boot (fails to mount) and won’t allow me to access the root user from emergency mode (“the root account is locked”). I found that I should be able unlock the root user by accessing the GRUB menu. But no hotkey works on boot.

I can mount Umbrel OS system as an external drive by booting from a live USB, and access its files that way. I can see Umbrel OS only has the “EFI/boot/grub.cfg” file and there’s no “etc/default/grub” file

I tried opening the GRUB menu but no hotkey works to bring it up. How is this possible?

I just need access to command line so I can troubleshoot with journalctl why the system won’t boot.

specs:
Dell laptop.
Umbrel OS installed on external storage device.

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2

I solved the problem in 2 steps:

  1. I unlocked the root user:
    To unlock the root user I booted from a live USB, then mounted the HDD with Umbrel, and used the “chroot” method to root into the file system and change its root’s user password. Here are the commands I used:
lsblk
sudo mount /dev/sdc2 /mnt/c2
sudo mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt/c1
sudo mount -t proc none /mnt/c2/proc
sudo mount --bind /sys /mnt/c2/sys
sudo mount --rbind /dev/ /mnt/c2/dev

sudo /usr/sbin/chroot /mnt/c2
sudo passwd root
exit

Then reboot into the HDD and the emergency mode allowed me access to root.
Then I used the journalctl -xb command and saw that the HDD mount was timing out after 3 minutes (Umbrel OS is VERY IMPATIENT)

  1. To fix the mount error, I added the mount option “x-systemd.mount-timeout=600” in /etc/fstab for the /data partition
    So the line in my fstab file looks like this:
/dev/disk/by-partuuid/d1d36e34-2753-4dc7-96eb-3c9b5584e867   /data          auto       defaults,x-systemd.growfs,x-systemd.mount-timeout=600      0  0

In summary:
Umbrel should unlock root user by default so we can troubleshoot in cases like these, and it should also add more patience for the mount process, by default.