Experimenting with VMs on Ubuntu, I had the system running on a relatively small root disk. Was troubleshooting problems in the disk array, doing a lot of booting, and crashing, when suddenly the boot wouldn’t finish. Fortunately the boot wasn’t quiet and I could watch as it tried 20-30 times to start the gdm service.

I change the default to multi-user.target and got it up, and what do you know, the root filesystem is at 100%. Cleaned up some logs and crash logs and it came right up.

Interesting that it doesn’t have a way to at least alert you that is what its problem is.