Describe the bug

This is with the latest image as of today. I have been setting up a kiosk and as part of that I have partitioned the SD card with three partitions: the first two for /boot and / as normal, and third exfat partition on /dev/mmcblk0p3.

This works fine until I enable overlayfs, at which point I get this in the boot sequence:

Mounting media-data.mount - /media/data...
[FAILED] Failed to mount media-data.mount - /media/data
See 'systemctl status media-data.mount' for details
[DEPEND] Dependency failed for local-fs.target - Local File Systems

And a few lines later I'm.. "in emergency mode. After logging in , type "journalctl -xb to view system logs" - but I can't even do that as the final message is Cannot open access top console, the root account is locked.

I've tried

• moving the data to an external USB disk, so it's /dev/sda1 instead of /dev/mmcblk0p3
• adding nofail to the /etc/fstab
• adding x-systemd.automount to /etc/fstab

But same results every time. Due to the locked filesystem and the inability to login, I can't even see the logs.

The only way I can carve out a writable area on the disk is to make sure the boot partition is not read-only, and put a directory on that. But this is far from ideal. Enabling the overlayfs should work if there are additional partitions, and they should not be part of the overlay (ie. they should be read-write).

I think what's described here is enough to reproduce fairly easily. The main thing is that /etc/fstab contains something like

/dev/mmcblk0p3 /media/data auto noatime 0 0

Steps to reproduce the behaviour

As described above.

Device (s)

Raspberry Pi 5

System

Raspberry Pi reference 2025-05-13
Generated using pi-gen, https://github.com/RPi-Distro/pi-gen, 5dabc7dc940059dfbc46af5d97b60a1e812523dd, stage4

2025/05/08 15:13:17
Copyright (c) 2012 Broadcom
version 69471177 (release) (embedded)

Linux clinictv 6.12.34+rpt-rpi-2712 #1 SMP PREEMPT Debian 1:6.12.34-1+rpt1~bookworm (2025-06-26) aarch64 GNU/Linux

Logs

No response

Additional context

No response