Oh man I would do this all the time. When I worked a grocery store it had suse and later they switched to windows. Before if anything didn't work it was user error like rebooting with personal items left on the keyboard. After we had self checkouts that would bluescreen and other than myself only two people knew how to reboot them. If it had arch I would make sure everyone knew.
No idea where it's from or what it usually looks like since I just nabbed this off of Facebook, but my guess is to display ads, or perhaps some slo-mo videos of fresh fruit being tossed in an appetizing manner in an attempt to trigger your Pavlovian reflex to buy some of those oranges.
Couldn't find any pictures of that particular setup operating under normal conditions, but here are some similar ones to give you an idea:
It is actually a boot failure. Normally the kernel reads some config from the initrd (the bootloader loads initrd and passes it to the kernel - thanks dan) and then does a bunch of setup stuff, and then it mounts the actual root filesystem, and then switches to using that. In this case, the root filesystem has failed to mount.
Hardware failure is most likely the cause, but misconfiguration can also make this happen. Probably hardware though.
If its misconfiguration, an admin can reattempt to mount the root drive on /new_root, and then ctrl-d to get the init system to try again
ELI5: couldnt open C:/ drive
Edit: clarified what loads the initrd - as per dans comment.
Switching to Linux and actually being able to see real time logs made me actually curious how it works, so that's one gear out of the machine demistified
So the weird block character in the "see... for details" line is replacing "nitrd-switch-roo" just to shorten the line? That's what I was trying to figure out.
any idea what this is? Ive been seeing this a lot when I start up my laptop - sometimes it goes away automatically, sometimes it doesnt, but I have no idea what to even search for.
I haven't seen this thing in action under normal conditions since I just looted the picture off Faceborg, but I imagine it probably shows a slideshow of ads.
I had a HDD fail on my media server and that screen gives me ptsd. I could clean it up with fsck for a while, but it meant plugging a keyboard and monitor into the box. A huge PIMA, I should have swapped out that drive the first time it happened.
Do you not like sound of the read head scraping against the platter on spin up? Weirdo... It's a rare treat, so you have to appreciate it while it's there.