Ubuntu won't boot, waiting on dev-mapper-cryptswap

I updated Ubuntu 18.10 cosmic and of course everything was crappy. The trackpad started registered spurious touches of my palm in the upper left corner and made typing very frustrating. And then the machine started hanging with a weird window manager (GNOME?) glitch after I had it in sleep mode all night with the lid shut, so I had to hard reboot in the morning.

This happened twice and then it wouldn’t reboot anymore. It would hang on the purple screen with the word 'ubuntu' and some loading bar dots. I force rebooted (hold shift for GRUB) and selected the option 'Advanced' and chose a recovery mode option of the latest version. Then I could see that we were endlessly waiting on dev-mapper-cryptswap1.device and that is why it will not boot, not even in recovery.

I found several sites suggesting I edit the /etc/fstab file and comment out any lines talking about cryptswap. (to do note for myself for later: figure out if I should make an encrypted swap, or just live without the swap)
https://ubuntuhak.blogspot.com/2017/05/a-job-is-running-for-dev-mapper.html

OK but if I can’t boot, I can’t access any shell! How do I edit the fstab file??? I found this answer:
https://superuser.com/questions/1013658/how-to-skip-startup-jobs-for-fstab-no-timeout-centos7

But I was missing the context for it. Where do I enter that emergency boot parameter?

I was getting sick of typing google search queries in to my phone, so I went back to Grub and looked around. In the advanced options section, the text suggests you can press ‘e’ to edit the entry. Then I saw something like this:

setparams ‘Ubuntu, with Linux 4.18.0-11-generic’
    recordfail
    load_video
    gfxmode $linux_gfx_mode
    insmod gzio
    if [ x$grub_platform = xxen ]; then insmod xzio; insmod lzopio; fi
    insmod part_gpt
    insmod ext2
    if [ x$feature_platform_search_hint = xy ]; then
      search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root [uuid]
    else
      search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root [uuid]
    fi
    echo ‘Loading Linux 4.18.0-11-generic …’
    linux /boot/vmlinuz-4.18.0-11-generic root=UUID=[the uuid] ro acpi_rev_override quiet splash $vt_handoff
    echo ‘Loading initial ramdisk …’
    initrd /boot/initrd.img-4.18.0-11-generic 

So that seemed promising. I entered a -b into the /boot/vmlinuz arguments, as such:

linux /boot/vmlinuz-4.18.0-11-generic root=UUID=[the uuid] ro acpi_rev_override quiet splash $vt_handoff -b

Then hit control + x as the instructions suggested to boot. This doesn’t permanently change the options, but rather boots with this modified entry just this once. So I entered emergency mode, hit control + d as the instructions suggested, and I was in.

Back to the instructions from the answer from before: https://superuser.com/questions/1013658/how-to-skip-startup-jobs-for-fstab-no-timeout-centos7

In case this leaves the root file system read-only, you can run mount -o remount,rw / once in the shell.

I didn’t give this a try without doing that; I just assumed it was necessary, and that had I skipped that I would have found that I was looking at my file system in read-only mode.

So back to https://ubuntuhak.blogspot.com/2017/05/a-job-is-running-for-dev-mapper.html: 

The solution is to remove or comment out the "cryptswap" entries from /etc/fstab and /etc/crypttab. This can be done easily by editing the above mentioned files as commenting out the lines that say cryptswap by placing a "#" in front of the matching lines.

I did that, saved the file in nano (I forgot how to use nano, but the bottom of the screen suggested some commands, so I did the one for exit and then it asked me to type Y to save before exit). Then I restarted the computer, I believe with the command shutdown, and then pressing the power button afterwards to reboot.

Then I figured before I got back to work, I could make a short blog post out of it. Here you go.

-Shira