Arch Linux

trevvvv.85

Member

Registered: 2016-08-31

Posts: 5

New arch installation boots to grub shell

Hey Everyone. New here. Trying to install arch on my lenovo x220.....haven't used Linux for about 10 years, looking to get back into it.

I think I did the install right, made the separate partition for EFI, installed grub, no errors, but it just boots to the grub shell and I have no idea what to do next.

Any suggestions would be awesome. Also if there is an easier way to sort out this boot loader stuff I'd love to hear it.

Thanks

bullet

Member

Registered: 2016-08-04

Posts: 18

Re: New arch installation boots to grub shell

I had the same problem a couple of times. That happened when grub-mkconfig didn't find my Linux kernel images in /boot, make sure they are there. Your grub.conf is probably empty apart from some comments, right? That happened to me when I rm -rf /boot when reconfiguring stuff, another reason might be not having /boot mounted when installing Arch.

What fixed the problem for me was booting into the Arch stick (using UEFI, that's important), mounting my already installed root filesystem into /mnt again, mounting my /boot partition into /mnt/boot, arch-chroot into /mnt, remove the linux package (pacman -R linux) and then reinstalling it (pacman -S linux). This copied the kernel images into /boot again. Then grub-mkconfig found them and added proper boot entries to the grub.conf - and I didn't see the grub shell again!

Ninja edit: In hindsight, not having /boot mounted is probably nonsense, then there'd be no bootloader at all. I guess you misplaced your kernel images another way or made the same stupid mistake and "cleaned" /boot when configuring stuff like me, deleting the images.

Last edited by bullet (2016-08-31 04:23:17)

trevvvv.85

Member

Registered: 2016-08-31

Posts: 5

Re: New arch installation boots to grub shell

Thanks bullet! That seems to have fixed the grub issue, must have not had /boot mounted when I did the install.

So grub works but now I have a kernel panic on boot:

Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)

I think I must be missing something. Everything works fine when I boot through the USB drive....

Head_on_a_Stick

Member

From: The Wirral

Registered: 2014-02-20

Posts: 8,778

Website

Re: New arch installation boots to grub shell

I think I did the install right, made the separate partition for EFI, installed grub, no errors

This is far too vague, please provide more details -- what is your partition table layout (`parted -l`), where did you mount the ESP, which commands did you use to install the bootloader to the disk, what is the content of grub.cfg, etc

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Jin, Jîyan, Azadî

trevvvv.85

Member

Registered: 2016-08-31

Posts: 5

Re: New arch installation boots to grub shell

Thanks....ended up just re-installing Arch....6th time was a charm! I think I have a pretty good understanding of the install process now....I never thought I would miss the old slackware installer.

Cheers!