Digital Ocean: "Failed to open serialization file readonly file system" Issue #Ubuntu

After applying an apt update + upgrade to my Ubuntu VM at Digital Ocean I started seeing the message in the title.

The Wisdom of Internet say's that this problem typically occur when the UUID in /etc/fstab does not match the one reported by blkid. I checked that's not the case here.

I checked the disk for error and it is clean.

I am able to boot the VM in recovery mode which indicates that the VM Image is ok. The process followed was enabling rescue mode ->entering interactive shell -> typing reboot -> selecting boot from harddisk.

Since I reported this issue two other DO customers have reported the exact same problem and have confirmed that the recovery mechanism works.

My understanding is, the Latest Ubuntu updates are not able to play well with Digital Oceans Hardware.

DO has not been able to resolve the issue since the past 4 days. Internet is not shedding any light on this issue other than blkid/uuid mismatch

Any suggestions on next steps is welcome

Solution 1:

It seems the issue is the current latest version of snapd.

Following the instructions in that thread helped me out:

1. Power down your DigitalOcean image.
2. In the droplet settings, go to "Recovery" -> Select "Boot from Recovery ISO".
3. Power on your droplet, and open an access console.
4. Mount your partition (1), then attempt to chroot in (5).
5. Run sudo apt-get install snapd=2.32.5+18.04. Exit, power off.
6. "Recovery" -> Select "Boot from Hard Drive". You should be good to go.

Following these steps should downgrade you to a working version of snapd, until an patched version is released.