Hi!

Half an hour ago today, when I turned on my computer, went to the systemd-boot boot loader, chose “Arch Linux” from the list of boot entries, I was faced with a system that is stuck at boot as seen from the image I uploaded.

So far, I’ve tried disabling Overdrive by editing the kernel parameters at boot, and by booting an Arch Linux live ISO to no avail. As in, I’m stuck at the same stage of the booting process, even when using the aforementioned live ISO. Which means I can’t really boot into the system.

This happened before, like, a few months ago. I either booted with a live ISO and executed mkinitcpio -P, or just did a hard reset, as I waited for a kernel, GPU drivers or mesa update. About a month ago, it stopped happening and the system booted fine. I don’t really know what fixed it, sorry. Until today, that is.

I’m at a loss of what to do aside from either reinstalling Arch Linux or installing a different distro. I really don’t want to do that, though, as I haven’t really done any backups of my config files, and I’m generally happy with how I’ve set up my system. The fact that the live ISO didn’t work also made me think of a hardware problem, namely the GPU, which complicates things even more, as I don’t have a spare one.

Some information about my hardware:

  • GPU: Radeon RX Vega 56
  • Motherboard: ASUS Prime X470-Pro
  • CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 2700X

I ran # pacman -Syu last night so everything is updated. Not sure how relevant this is but I’m using the radeon open-source drivers.

Hopefully all of this was somewhat clear and if there’s something I missed, please let me know.

Thanks in advance!

EDIT: Changed the GPU to a different PCIe slot and everything’s working fine so far. I’m not celebrating just yet because when this first happened a few months ago, I’d hard reset the PC and everything would work fine. But if I shut it down and let it pass like 12 hours before I’d power it on again, the problem would reappear. So I’m just basically waiting for tomorrow now.

Final EDIT: Yep, it was the PCIe slot. Left it powered down for about 12 hours, booted it up and everything works fine. Thank you again to everybody who chimed in with suggestions.

  • @TootSweet@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2•3 days ago

    A few ideas:

    • If it’s a hard drive, listen to see if you keep getting hard drive noises after the freeze.
    • Try SSH’ing in to that box (or otherwise try making a network connection to it.) Just to make sure the system is actually freezing and it’s not just the graphics screwing up and not updating the display while continuing to boot.
    • Delete/uninstall your AMD firmware. Or if you don’t have it installed, install it.
    • If you’re currently booting in EFI mode, try BIOS mode. Or vice versa.
    • Try booting with an incorrect “root” kernel parameter. My thought is maybe if it’s loading a module that’s causing issues, if it can’t get the root FS, it can’t load modules. If it doesn’t have the same issue, that will tell you something. (And if it does, that’ll tell you something too.)
    • Try other distros’s live ISOs to see if you you can isolate anything that makes a difference.