OS Partition Won't Boot Without Manual Command After fstab/Mount Point Edits

[cinder sun]

Recently Linux Mint stopped automounting my external drives, for some reason, which is why I'm putting this in the "mint-support" section. I'm not sure what happened but something broke the automount. I haven't made any system changes recently until today; I wanted my automount back, so I changed some settings for my drives in the disks app. I thought I avoided modifying my OS partition because it explicitly warned me that changing the settings may result in not being able to boot. Either something glitched or I brainfarted. Either way, thanks to the users on this page:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/383595/repairing-fstab-read-only
I am able to boot into my system with this command at the tty: mount -n -o remount -t ext4 /dev/sdd2 /

My issue now is that I have to enter this command every single time I boot my system to get in. How can I fix this? Something somewhere is looking for the wrong device identifier to boot up my system. I've tried searching the net but I'm not understanding how to correct this error. I did check the grub file in /boot/grub/ but I'm struggling to understand what I should be looking for, if that's even the right place to look. From what I've read, I should look for "root=" under the Linux Mint Cinnamon menu option, which DOES have the correct UUID of my boot partition. So, I'm stumped. Help appreciated, thank you for reading.

Fixed by overwriting my fstab with a clean version of the file from one of my timeshift backups (always set up timeshift!). I've attached images of the "correct" and "broken" fstab formats in the comments below for people who may run into this issue in the future.

[limpid jacinth]

fix the uuid in the fstab file. use disks to view for each partition

[rustic mortar]

so, what happens after you power on your system? where are you entering the command? I'd suggest to repair the filesystem also

[cinder sun]

Is the UUID the problem? In my fstab file the boot partition is identified as /dev/sdd2. Should it not be? How do I know what identifier the system is looking for on boot?

[cinder sun]

I go to grub, choose Linux Mint 22 Cinnamon, then I see a tty. I log on with my username and password and enter the command. I checked the filesystem in the disks app and it says its not damaged, should I still attempt a repair? If so, should I do that from grub (and how do I do that)?

[rustic mortar]

what

so, it works?

[cinder sun]

Usually I don't see a tty, I see grub and then it boots to the Linux Mint login screen. Now i'm seeing a tty prompt and i have to remount my partition to gain access to the OS.

[cinder sun]

I'm in my OS now yes, I'm just trying to fix it so it works like it did before and I don't have to remount the partition to access my OS

Process of booting was:
Bios -> Grub -> Linux Mint Login Screen -> Cinnamon

Now process of booting is:
Bios -> Grub -> TTY + Remount every time I boot -> Linux Mint Login Screen -> Cinnamon

[rustic mortar]

I don't understand anything you're saying but live boot,
mount your root and EFI partition as /mnt and /mnt/boot/efi respectively,
then mv /mnt/etc/fstab /mnt/etc/fstab.bak
then sudo apt install arch-install-scripts
and sudo genfstab > /mnt/etc/fstab

[cinder sun]

Sorry if I'm explaining poorly, I'm very confused as to how this happened myself. I was trying to be careful not to mess up the boot drive's parameters but somehow they got messed up anyway. I thought I only touched those of my external drives. Perhaps the mount point I assigned an external drive was being used by my primary drive and I didn't realize. Thank you for the advice I'll try it when I get a chance!

If it helps, my fstab currently looks like this

[rustic mortar]

how did this happen

[cinder sun]

Should fstab not look like this? I'm a total linux n00b

[rustic mortar]

is this a live boot or an installed environment?

[cinder sun]

This is my installed Linux Mint 22 partition mounted at /dev/sdd2 /

[rustic mortar]

just do what I said.

[cinder sun]

Will do, thanks

[rustic mortar]

I suggest to not mess with it if you don't know how it works and don't want to break it.

you can use the Disks app if you want to edit mount points, it's more foolproof

[cinder sun]

Sorry if I was unclear, I made these changes using the disks app

That's why I'm confused

[rustic mortar]

this is Linux mint?

[cinder sun]

Yep

This is my os parition settings. It originally had a warning saying something like "don't modify this or your system may not boot." So I thought I avoided it. I don't know what happened.

I changed my external drives' "user session defaults" setting to off so they would auto mount. But I may have accidentally changed the "identify as" setting of my boot drive. I tried changing it to the identifier that uses the UUID but that didn't fix the problem.

[rustic mortar]

did you modify it?

[cinder sun]

I'm pretty sure I didn't, specifically because it said that, but I may have brain farted and accidentally changed it when I was changing the "identify as" mount points of my external drives.

I set my external drives to use /dev/sda and so fourth instead of their UUIDs and I ensured their "mount at system startup" bools were set to true. They now auto mount correctly, but I seem to have broken my OS partition's boot somehow lol.

That's the main thing I'm wondering how to fix, somewhere something is trying to boot into my OS partition and is failing.

[rustic mortar]

somewhere something is your fstab being broken

[cinder sun]

That's reassuring because hopefully it just needs the correct identifier. I was worried I broke something in the kernel

[rustic mortar]

even if the kernel was broken, which I'm not sure how would happen, you can just reinstall it

[cinder sun]

Yeah true, if I can't fix this issue I'll just do a clean install. I'd just rather avoid that bc I'll have to reinstall everything

[rustic mortar]

just do the fix and stop yammering

[cinder sun]

rude

[rustic mortar]

listen am just being honest

[cinder sun]

We were having a discussion dude I'm not senselessly yammering lol. Anyway, I found a timeshift backup of my fstab file and there's a clear formatting difference. I'm going to just overwrite the broken fstab with my old one and that'll proabably fix it.

That fixed it, gonna close the issue. Thanks anyway for the advice.

Clean/Broken fstab for people running into this issue in the future

[limpid jacinth]

In other words, this.