"SteamOS is attempting to recover from a fatal error."

[Romania]

Hi. Recently when I turn on my Steam Machine I have been getting a screen with the SteamOS logo that says "SteamOS is attempting to recover from a fatal error," and I have to restart the System. I can't do anything, I just get the screen. I tried leaving it on for several hours with no sucsess. Does anyone have a fix?

[ProfessorKaos64]

Sounds like '/usr/bin/steamos-autorepair.sh' is trying to run over and over again. Can you boot into recovery mode? Hit esc a few times right as your boot screen disappears before the Grub menu would usually show up. You should get boot menu options, one of them recovery. Run '/usr/bin/steamos-autorepair.sh' and paste that output to slexy.org for us to look at. Ultimately, running the "Restore system partition" from that same menu should get you back up and running. This will not remove your already downloaded games that live in your $HOME partition.

If the issue persists, and nothing else works, be sure to report this at https://github.com/ValveSoftware/SteamOS/issues

[kopertop]

I ran into this issue with a brand new machine, right from Amazon, and I even tried using the Dell Recovery disk with no avail, however I was able to resolve this issue using Recovery mode and then manually upgrading, then rebooting.

1) Plugging into Hardwire network
2) Rebooting into "Recovery Mode" which done by Spamming the Escape key, then choosing the "Steam OS Advanced" option, and the second option there which includes (recovery mode).
3) Running "dhclient eth0" to start up networking, verified it was connecting using "ping google.com"
4) apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade (follow all the prompts, keeping local version of grub)
5) After everything upgraded successfully, shutdown -r now

After the reboot I verified a few times it was working by rebooting a few more times, unplugged the ethernet cable and rebooted, and now it's all working just fine! My guess is that after the first upgrade attempt when it went to complete installation after rebooting it couldn't figure out how to connect to my wireless network, which caused this infinite loop of "SteamOS is attempting to recover from a fatal error".