Arch Linux

CoppaMan

Member

Registered: 2016-12-01

Posts: 4

White stationary dash after boot up

My arch installation (approx. 2 years old) won't boot beyond displaying a static "-" character.
It happend 2-3 restarts after an update, so I followed these instructions thinking that something went wrong during the update.
The laptop runs fine under windows (dual boot) so there should be no hardware defects.
Because it freezes, there are no meaningful logs after chrooting into said installation.

The only two messages that appears after grub on screen before the freeze happens are:

starting version 234
p_arch: clean .../... files, .../... blocks

where ... indicates a number

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 29,529

Website

Re: White stationary dash after boot up

Please do not follow random unsupported guides from over 5 years ago.  Search the forums for similar issues.  You would have found many threads suggesting adding "intel_iommu=off" to the kernel line which may or may not be the fix you need, but give the related problems on the forums that this has solved it is an obvious first step.

If you can chroot into your system, then you can gather information about your hardware and configurations to share here.  Please do so.

Grub configs would be a good start.

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

CoppaMan

Member

Registered: 2016-12-01

Posts: 4

Re: White stationary dash after boot up

I checked my grub config and it turns out that I missed the underscore in intel_iommu and used a dash instead when I was trying this fix out earlier. The laptop now boots up.
Is there a workaround for not using the iommu? My laptop has a firewire port which can't be disabled so an iommu would pretty nice to have.

But thank you for your time to get my arch installation working again.