So, today I was trying to create a Windows USB installer.
‘Now what could go wrong with this simple task’, you might ask. But you, my friend, are underestimating me.
As soon as I inserted the pen drive, a notification popped up saying that all the drivers have been installed successfully.
However, there was one small problem; it was not getting listed under My Computer.
I searched online for this problem and found that this could be due to the pen drive either being unformatted or just not having any labels assigned to it.
So I opened Disk Management in order to format it.
But since Windows Disk Management shows ext4 partitions and unformatted partitions without any labels, I somehow deleted both, the pen-drive as well as my Linux swap partitions (and got a direct nomination for the Most absent-minded person ever award).
I thought to myself: “This shouldn’t be that big of a problem. Swap space is anyway just required for paging and hibernation, which are not critical for the functioning of an OS; I’ll just boot into Ubuntu and reformat the Swap partition correctly.”
But as soon as I rebooted the system, instead of the usual boring GRUB menu, I got a prompt with an error message saying ‘error: unknown filesystem’.
I googled the error message and found a way to somehow boot into Ubuntu.
After logging in, I reformatted the swap partition following the instructions given here, and rebooted the system once again.
But this time the boot process took an unusually long time.
I searched about this problem and found that one of the reasons of a slow boot could be that the system is unable to mount a partition due to invalid UUID in the /etc/fstab file.
And it was indeed the problem in my case; apparently, after reformatting the swap partition, its UUID changes.
So I updated the fstab file with the correct UUID and, lo and behold, the boot time was back to normal.
Back to the grind 