virtualbox.org

With the older 3.3.* kernels, I would get the emergency mode message about "use systemctl default or press Ctrl+D to continue" and could ignore it and press Ctrl+D to continue booting. With the 3.4.0 kernel, pressing Ctrl+D got me the same message repeated again. I logged in to emergency mode with my root password and noted dmesg listed a dozen failed jobs citing "dependency" as the cause.

After reading A LOT on the issue, I found some posts for Fedora 16 stating that a problem with mounting the /home partition was the cause of the dependency failure. I added "nofail" to the options in /etc/fstab after "defaults" and it works like a charm now. Hope this helps someone else in a similar spot.

I'm noticing a singular lack of the word "VirtualBox" in that message. Are you sure you've got the right forums?

LOL, yeah, sorry, I am running 64 bit Fedora 17 in Virtualbox on a Windows 7 host... May refer more to Fedora than to Virtualbox, but nonetheless, other folks running it like I do may run into the same problem.

Actually, this post led to me solving my similar problem.

Every time I'd try to upgrade the kernel, my Fedora 17 guest would give me that emergency mode message. I could never figure out why (I just started skipping kernel updates), but the 'nofail' suggestion was the key.

It turns out, I had added a line to my /etc/fstab to auto-mount one of my Virtualbox shared folders. By upgrading the kernel, I (obviously) lost the kernel module that mount relies on, and so it was forcing the emergency mode message. By adding nofail to the options, it allows me to boot, install the guest additions, and reboot. No more emergency mode!

So thanks for posting that! It definitely helped.

thx psndCsrV + brainclots - this helped me so much!