Arch Linux

markasoftware

Member

Registered: 2014-06-22

Posts: 16

Arch hangs/freezes completely during startup/systemd

I just installed Arch onto my computer a few days ago. It's dual booting with win10 technical preview using grub as the bootloader. It's legacy BIOS and MBR partitioning. The only thing I did apart from exactly following the instructions in the beginners guide was I didn't wipe the disk since I wanted to keep Windows, I only made one partition (root), and no home partition, I created and enabled a 10GB swap partition, and I formatted my root partition with btrfs instead of ext4. I can boot into Windows just fine by selecting the Windows loader from GRUB, but when I try to boot Arch it always freezes at some point during the startup, before I can see the login prompt, while it's still saying things like "[ ok ] reached target something". What I mean by "freeze" is that nothing more appears on the screen, and the cursor stops flashing. I can't do anything at all. The weird thing is, it doesn't always freeze at one specific place. Sometimes it stops after saying "Activating swap", sometimes it gets past there and freezes after saying "[ ok ] Reached target Sound Card". I've tried booting it probably nearly 10 times now, it never manages to make it all the way to the login screen. I can boot from the live usb fine, and I didn't get any strange errors during installation. I've installed arch linux before on a different machine, and it worked right off the bat.

Can anyone give me any advice as to what I should try to do to fix this or what I should do to narrow down the possible causes and troubleshoot further?

Thank you in advance!

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 29,561

Website

Re: Arch hangs/freezes completely during startup/systemd

I've heard a little about some major problems with btrfs and recent kernels.  I don't have links for this at my fingertips, nor can I elaborate - I've never used nor know anyting about btrfs, so I've not really payed close attention to these issues, but I've seen them around the forums.  But for these same reasons, take this with a very large grain of salt: I could be completely wrong.  But it should be easy to test if you booted into the live medium, installed an LTS kernel, and tried booting that.

---

"UNIX is simple and coherent..." - Dennis Ritchie, "GNU's Not UNIX" -  Richard Stallman

markasoftware

Member

Registered: 2014-06-22

Posts: 16

Re: Arch hangs/freezes completely during startup/systemd

Ok trilby, I booted from live USB and chrooted in, then installed the linux-lts package, then rebooted. Same issue, didn't fix anything. Thanks for your effort though! any other ideas?