My regular maintenance of my Fedora instance includes doing incessant upgrading using

sudo dnf upgrade

which updates any possible packages and the kernel. This has worked fine until recently, when two of my computers started freezing during the upgrading process. Usually, I would wait about 10 minutes before hard shutting down the computer and powering back up without any obvious detremental effects.

But a few days ago, I cycled the computer after a freeze after about a minute. When trying to powering back up, I was welcomed by the emergency mode saying

Cannot open access to console, the root account is locked.
See sulogin(8) man page for more details.

Press Enter to continue.

Needless to say, anything I tried to do at this stage would not bear any fruit, resulting in a lot of FAILED messages, from failure to mount /boot/efi to Failed to start Load Kernel Module.

The problem was resolved by booting into a live USB Fedora and installing a fresh install. The only thing to watch for is to not reformat the /home folder. After the system was up and running, I was welcommd by having all my setting being retained, i.e. all Firefox windows were as I left them before the crash. When I installed Slack, all channels were loaded without going through the tedious logging in using two-factor authentication. PyCharm also kept all the sweet settings I set.

The key to fixing the computer is just pouring copious quantities of your favorite wine. And having a backup computer also helps.