Arch Linux

madnug35

Member

Registered: 2018-08-02

Posts: 4

Intel Hades Canyon nuc installation issues

Hello everyone,

I am having trouble installing arch onto my Intel Hades Canyon nuc. This is kinda my second time with arch, as I successfully got it working on a vm on my windows machine. I am also new to the forums and this is my first post. Please let me know if any of my post breaks any of the rules, isn't specific enough, or could be formatted better. I will try to make the changes and will be sure not to let any errors happen again.

First let me post some specs:
Computer: Intel Hades Canyon Nuc NUC8i7HNK1 https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en … i7hnk.html
RAM: 16gb
Drives: 2 WDBlack 250 gb nvme drives

What I am trying to do:
I would like to use both my drives in the nuc for a dual boot. I have windows 10 running on one nvme drive, I would like to install Arch on the other and use Grub as a boot loader to switch between the two operating systems.

What I did:
First I went into the nuc's bios and disabled the Windows nvme drive and secure boot. This allowed me to boot straight to the installation media and not worry about windows messing with my install. I plan on turning this drive back on after a successful install and then having windows show up as a bootable selection in Grub with some configuration.
As per the wiki I followed the instructions for a UEFI installation since my system is UEFI based on the return value from the EFI driver check from the first step.

 ls /sys/firmware/efi/efivars 

I completed the next steps of changing the hardware clock and checking my internet connection correctly. I then moved on to partitioning the disk. I followed these instructions (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/EF … _partition) for creating an EFI system partition since my system is UEFI. I properly created and double checked that I created a GPT table and two partitions with the fdisk tool. The first partition was a 550 GiB partition created and formatted for EFI. The second partition was the rest of the drive and that was left for the os itself. I then mounted these partitions to the system. The second partition was mounted to /mnt. For the EFI partition I created a directory in /mnt called /boot/efi and mounted the EFI partition there as per the instructions. I went on with the rest of the installation with installing the base with pacstrap, generating the fstab file, arch-chroot-ing into the new system, setting the time zone, doing the system localization, configuring my network, creating an initramfs, and changing the root password. For a boot loader I chose to use Grub. I used these instructions for Grub: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GRUB. With those instructions I installed the grub, the intel microcode, and efibootmgr packages, and ran the grub install command:

 # grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot/efi --bootloader-id=Arch 

For that command I substituted the efi directory with the directory I made and mounted the EFI partition to earlier and used Arch as my bootloader id. After this I generated the main configuration file with:

# grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

After all of this was completed I exited out of my newly created system and rebooted the system. I removed the installation media and was greeted by the Grub boot loader screen. I selected the first option which was my Arch installation and then the screen went black and showed the text:

Loading Linux 
Loading initial ramdisk
__

The system freezes there and nothing else happens.

What I have tried:
I have tried installing arch several times like this and have come up with the same issue on all occasions. I have tried:
1. Not using /boot/efi and just mounting the efi partition to /boot/ . That came up with the same problem.
2. Redoing the installation from scratch in case I missed a step. After double checking my steps and re reading the installation guides and other literature I still have the outcome even though I feel I performed all steps properly.
3. Updated my UEFI and BIOS to the most recent version from Intel's website. I did see some other people who have tried using deprecated BIOS versions on reddit. I think my issue lies within my Arch installation and something I did wrong so I am currently sticking to the most current BIOS and trying to not use any deprecated versions of anything. This also had the same outcome.

That's about it. I'm kinda stuck at this point. I know Arch will work on here as I have read other people have gotten it to work on their Hades Canyon nucs. I am also new to Arch so I wouldn't be surprised if I missed a step, did something wrong, or my initial approach to how things work is completely wrong. Any help would be greatly appreciated. And again, please let me know if any of my post is wrong or doesn't follow the forum rules.

Thanks

Steef435

Member

Registered: 2013-08-29

Posts: 577

Website

Re: Intel Hades Canyon nuc installation issues

Hi,

My first thought is "graphical issues" since the Vega graphics aren't supported by 4.17, they will be in kernel 4.18.

You could try chrooting in the machine (using the install iso) and reading the journal logs after a frozen screen to see if there's anything interesting, but you could also straight up disable the dedicated graphics in UEFI and see if you can get it to run on the intel graphics.

Does this get you anywhere?

heftig

Developer

From: Germany

Registered: 2010-04-19

Posts: 159

Re: Intel Hades Canyon nuc installation issues

Try booting with modprobe.blacklist=amdgpu,radeon

This might at least let you boot, with video provided by efifb. The missing GPU driver is the main roadblock for running Arch on a HC NUC.

To drive the GPU properly you need a v4.18 kernel (e.g. linux-mainline from the AUR) as well as the current linux-firmware package.

you could also straight up disable the dedicated graphics in UEFI and see if you can get it to run on the intel graphics.

This isn't going to help as the Intel GPU has no outputs. They're all attached to the Vega M.

Last edited by heftig (2018-08-02 14:55:11)

progandy

Member

Registered: 2012-05-17

Posts: 5,190

Re: Intel Hades Canyon nuc installation issues

This isn't going to help as the Intel GPU has no outputs. They're all attached to the Vega M.

At least on the HP Spectre x360 Vega M the outputs are all attached to the Intel GPU, the Vega only provides rendering with DRI_PRIME=1

Last edited by progandy (2018-08-02 15:15:38)

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loqs

Member

Registered: 2014-03-06

Posts: 17,323

Re: Intel Hades Canyon nuc installation issues

https://www.reddit.com/r/intelnuc/comme … es_canyon/

madnug35

Member

Registered: 2018-08-02

Posts: 4

Re: Intel Hades Canyon nuc installation issues

You could try chrooting in the machine (using the install iso) and reading the journal logs after a frozen screen to see if there's anything interesting, but you could also straight up disable the dedicated graphics in UEFI and see if you can get it to run on the intel graphics.

Does this get you anywhere?

Steef435, I tried looking through the journal logs after a frozen boot using

# journalctl -b

and that returned

No journal files were found.
-- No entries --

I am hoping I ran the right command and was looking at the right thing but I could be wrong.

madnug35

Member

Registered: 2018-08-02

Posts: 4

Re: Intel Hades Canyon nuc installation issues

Try booting with modprobe.blacklist=amdgpu,radeon

heftig, I am a little unsure as to how to do that, I'm still new to this. I tried searching around for how to do that and I am not sure how to blacklist the gpu. I tried running that as a command and that returned a bash error. I'm guessing this then goes in a file somewhere? I tried getting into the modprobe.d file and that turned out to be a directory? Then I tried making a file in that directory to hold the line of text that blacklists the gpu and that didn't work either. Does the place I'm supposed to put that line of text already exist?

madnug35

Member

Registered: 2018-08-02

Posts: 4

Re: Intel Hades Canyon nuc installation issues

https://www.reddit.com/r/intelnuc/comme … es_canyon/

I read through this and thought trying the updated kernel rc would work. Only problem is this is on the AUR. I've tried installing yaourt on my install after chroot-ing into the mounted partitions. I changed the /etc/pacman.conf file to contain

[archlinuxfr]
SigLevel = Never
Server = http://repo.archlinux.fr/$arch

When I try installing yaourt using

#pacman -S yaourt

I get

error: target not found: yaourt

I also tried installing yaourt by cloning the git repository and after I have cloned and cd'd to the directory with the repository I ran

makepkg -si

and that returned the error

 ==> ERROR: Running makepkg as root is not allowed as it can cause permanent, catastrophic damage to your system. 

I was thinking about making a user on my arch installation while chroot-ed but I think this is a bit much and maybe I performed a previous step wrong?