I was just starting up the system and opened Steam when Gnome locked up, the mouse worked but nothing else including alt+f2 worked. I waited a couple of minutes for the drive activity light to disappear, and I hard rebooted it. After the Systemd boot menu I see a flash of gray from the Gnome login screen right before being dumped here.
Booting between the current kernel and the old kernel via the systemd boot menu makes no difference. I haven't tried booting into the recovery partition yet, but I can boot into Windows which rules out hardware failure.
After some searching I found this: https://askubuntu.com/questions/646414/welcome-to-emergency-mode-think-it-is-a-fsck-problem
After booting into the recovery partition and running fdisk -l I get this:
sda appears to be the NTFS formatted Segate drive installed in my system that mounts on boot. (I have checked it in Windows and it is fine)
sdb is the drive PopOS is installed on, but I don't know what to do about the "Partition 1 does not start on physical sector boundary" error. If anyone has any information on this I would love to know more.
As you can see here, fsck thinks that sdb2 (The partition I believe Pop is installed on, is fine)
Running cat /etc/fstab provides this:
Am I screwed? How can I figure out what went wrong and (hopefully) fix it? If anyone has any idea what's going on here I could really appreciate the help. If worst comes for worse, would refreshing the OS from the recovery partition fix this issue?