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I have Arch, recently updated (two weeks ago, maybe three) on a Thinkpad W530. When powered up, it'll boot only so far as three or four lines on the screen, the last being "/dev/sda1 clean " followed by counts of files and blocks. It almost always hangs here. The keyboard does nothing, not even ctrl-alt-del. Once in a while, as that last line appears, the screen goes dim.
If I plug in a USB stick with an Arch install .iso then it'll boot up normally (usually) all the way to a root command prompt. I can mount the main disk (/dev/sda1 etc) just fine and see all my files. If I then type "reboot" or power down and back up, yank the out the USB memory, and wait then maybe the machine will boot up fully, from the main disk. Maybe not. It's as if something about diddling around in the USB stick's version of Arch, mounting th disk and looking at files, or something I do while I'm there, puts the machine in a state where it can boot (maybe) from it's own disk. Note my use of the word 'maybe' - getting this machine to boot up fully is like playing a casino slot machine. I remember a certain Twighlight Zone episode - yeee, we don't want that to happen! Sometimes, like this evening, it took over 30 attempts to boot, with and without the USB stick, before I got it going.
Possibly unrelated - when the machine does boot up and I can run X windows, all i swell, and I close the lid before taking the machine with me somewhere, X crashes and keyboard becomes nonfunctional. That makes it hard to do things like stroll from the coffee shop to the office and continue work right where I left off.
This probably isn't enough to go on to solve the problem, though if it is, great. What ways could I investigate this boot-up problem, what additional information is needed, to find a solution?
Artist/Physicist, Herder of Pixels, Photons and Electrons
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