Arch Linux

klapaucius

Member

Registered: 2015-11-13

Posts: 5

[SOLVED] laptop won't boot following power cut

My power went out the other night and I awoke to a laptop that won't boot. It's a Dell Latitude with 3 primary partitions (sda1 - 512MB EFI, sda2 - extended LVM, sda3 4G swap). Root and home partitions are on separate logical volumes.

The UEFI menu loads, but when Arch is selected the screen goes blank and nothing happens. I've chrooted in from a live usb and run fsck on each partition, but they all come back clean. I had been using systemd-boot with no problems, but I installed grub to see if that helped. It didn't, except to the extent that that grub boot process freezes at "initialising ramdisk" instead of displaying nothing.

I then wiped the ESP and regenerated the systemd-boot loader entries and the kernel image. This got me back to square 1; the bootloader loads and lets me select Arch but gets no further. The only lead I can find that I haven't followed up is the suggestion that my root FS is corrupt and to create new ext4 journaling for it. I am hesitant to do anything that messes with my root partition, though, as that feels like something that might not be recoverable if I mess it up.

Any pointers or suggestions appreciated. I've been searching for stuff online for several days and I'm getting nowhere.

[Edit] Solved, at least partly. The power cut was a red herring. It was simply the first time the machine had been powered down since my last system upgrade. The problem is the same as described in this thread https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 8#p1578808 and here https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/46894. I have downgraded my kernel and can now boot as before.

Last edited by klapaucius (2015-11-15 13:58:22)

frank604

Member

From: BC, Canada

Registered: 2011-04-20

Posts: 1,212

Re: [SOLVED] laptop won't boot following power cut

Have you tried booting arch iso, mount your partitions, arch-chroot, reinstall base, kernel, and run mkinitcpio?

Last edited by frank604 (2015-11-13 23:57:18)

ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 19,804

Re: [SOLVED] laptop won't boot following power cut

In the chroot, you should be able to read your journals.  Anything interesting in them?

Last edited by ewaller (2015-11-14 03:54:42)

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klapaucius

Member

Registered: 2015-11-13

Posts: 5

Re: [SOLVED] laptop won't boot following power cut

Have you tried booting arch iso, mount your partitions, arch-chroot, reinstall base, kernel, and run mkinitcpio?

Hadn't reinstalled base. Tried the whole process over this morning, but still no progress past selecting Arch in the bootloader.

In the chroot, you should be able to read your journals.  Anything interesting in them?

Not to my eye. journalctl has a few network messages and then cuts off around the time the power went out. I had a poke around in /var/log but nothing there seemed relevant.

I'm facing up to the fact that I might just have to reinstall, so I've made a list of my installed packages. Most of my configs should be safe on the home volume with my data. But it bothers me that I don't know what the problem is, and I don't see why the same thing won't happen after a new install.

At some point in the process of refreshing the ESP the bootloader complained that it couldn't find vmlinuz-linux (because I'd forgotten to copy it to /boot). So it's clearly looking for the kernel image. What, then could be causing it to fail to boot the kernel now that it is available, and not display any error messages? and why would a whole new install prevent that happening?

klapaucius

Member

Registered: 2015-11-13

Posts: 5

Re: [SOLVED] laptop won't boot following power cut

Solved, at least partly. The power cut was a red herring. It was simply the first time the machine had been powered down since my last system upgrade. The problem is the same as described in this thread https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 8#p1578808 and here https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/46894. I have downgraded my kernel and can now boot as before.

Thanks for your replies.