Arch Linux

kapergagen

Member

Registered: 2025-01-24

Posts: 3

[SOLVED] Freezing on "Loading initial ramdisk" and artifacts in TTY

Hello, recently I have reinstalled Arch Linux on my laptop. Now it sometimes completely freezes in 2 different ways under different circumstances:
1. Randomly when both in TTY or Xorg. Last time it happened in TTY with vertical dark red stripes flickering
2. When booting any OS (Linux, Linux LTS, Windows). In case of Linux, it freezes on "Loading initial ramdisk". Sometimes it makes it to the boot log screen (where green [ OK ] labels are printed) and freezes in the middle of it. What is peculiar is that opening BIOS system diagnostics tab (specifically this tab) and then immediately exiting it and booting back into Linux bypasses these freezes. In fact, this is now my standard routine of turning on the laptop. My laptop also always fails to return from sleep.

By "completely freezes" I mean absolutely unresponsive. TTY switching, Ctrl+Alt+Del, even Alt+SysRq+B don't do anything.

My setup is (from neofetch):

Host: HP Laptop 15s-eq0xxx
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3500U with Radeon Vega Mobile Gfx (8) @ 2.100GHz
GPU: AMD ATI Radeon Vega Series / Radeon Vega Mobile Series

I don't think my Xorg setup is relevant since the freezes happen in TTY too.
I also noticed that while I have 16GB of RAM, Windows reports that only 6GB of them is available, and Linux reports that I just have 6GB of RAM (from neofetch, htop). I'm not sure whether these issues have distinct causes.

What I tried:
1. Added MODULES=(amdgpu) inside mkinitcpio.conf
2. Added amdgpu.sq_display=0 to kernel parameters
3. Tried booting into the LTS kernel
4. Ran some hardware tests inside BIOS, but not all of them (I doubt this is the cause)

Last edited by kapergagen (2026-06-29 17:26:04)

seth

Member

From: Won't reply 2 private help req

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 76,753

Re: [SOLVED] Freezing on "Loading initial ramdisk" and artifacts in TTY

I also noticed that while I have 16GB of RAM, Windows reports that only 6GB of them is available, and Linux reports that I just have 6GB of RAM

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Stress … Memtest86+

Otherwise (generically)
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Ryzen#Troubleshooting
http://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dual_bo … ibernation

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kapergagen

Member

Registered: 2025-01-24

Posts: 3

Re: [SOLVED] Freezing on "Loading initial ramdisk" and artifacts in TTY

It has been around 3 days now since all issues are gone. What I did was do a full system upgrade from time to time and update BIOS Hardware Diagnostics from version 8.0.0 to version 10.8.6 (It is kind of part of the BIOS but is updated separately from it). My RAM is now 13.6 GB which looks like a reasonable amount, assuming the rest is reserved as VRAM.