After something like 180 days uptime, my Funtoo server hung during a system update. The root filesystem was suddenly read-only. Couldn't find anything relevant in /var/log/ (which is now obvious, because the fs was read-only ), so I shut down all my tmux windows and rebooted.

Since I connect to the machine remotely, I tried that, but no response.

Went over to where it's at, and the sweet "login:" prompt lured me into thinking this was a minor glitch.

Logged in, but no network, no new log files. Oh, root fs still read-only. Weird.
Had other things to do – like sleep – so let it be, so that it would maybe come to its senses by itself.

Wishful thinking unsuccessful. Some fiddling and a reboot followed.

Hey, during booting and fsck something red flashed by just before the screen cleared and a nice "login:" prompt showed up.

Running fsck.ext4 manually showed some errors, so let it correct them – might have been the abrupt boot, I thought.

fsck, however, triggered an input/output error on the device and ended, leaving the fs completely disconnected – so no commands available. (Yeah, I have a feeling it's not the best idea to have the root fs on a SanDisk Extreme microSD card for (Fun)too long. But it was fast while it lasted.)

At last I found out what was actually happening during boot.

Anyway, the point I'm trying to make here is, that it would be really helpful if the boot screen was left as it is – with any errors still showing – if, for example, fsck fails with errors.