Arch Linux

skirmish

Member

Registered: 2018-02-28

Posts: 9

[SOLVED] Diagnose broken mkinitcpio.conf, please

I think I broke my mkinitcpio.conf while trying to merge changes from a recent mkinitcpio package update.

I have a LUKS-encrypted root partition.  Here is what I see when I reboot now: https://ibb.co/dwJJyMRv

Any ideas how could I diagnose what is failing and fix it?

/etc/mkinitcpio.conf HOOKS line (which I edited before boot started failing):

HOOKS=(base systemd autodetect microcode modconf kms keyboard keymap sd-vconsole sd-encrypt block filesystems fsck)

/etc/fstab:

# Static information about the filesystems.
# See fstab(5) for details.

# <file system> <dir> <type> <options> <dump <pass>
# /dev/mapper/root
UUID=b7d7df6e-99e6-42a8-9d31-f87324021263     /       ext4       rw,relatime     0 1

# /dev/nvmen0n1p1
UUID=6FDC-A1DE      /boot     vfat   rw,relatime,fmask=0022,dmask=0022,codepage=437,iocharset=ascii,shortname=mixed,utf8,errors=remount-ro    0 2

Last edited by skirmish (2025-11-16 19:57:04)

skirmish

Member

Registered: 2018-02-28

Posts: 9

Re: [SOLVED] Diagnose broken mkinitcpio.conf, please

My current thought is maybe I changed "encrypt" into "sd-encrypt" and that is causing the boot failure?  Looking at wiki, they require quite different configurations.

seth

Member

From: Don't DM me only for attention

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 70,959

Re: [SOLVED] Diagnose broken mkinitcpio.conf, please

sd-vconsole is supposed to replace keymap, but https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=310049
Here's a map: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Mkinit … mmon_hooks

My current thought is maybe I changed "encrypt" into "sd-encrypt" and that is causing the boot failure?  Looking at wiki, they require quite different configurations.

Yes. Why did you?

Edit: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=310004

Last edited by seth (2025-11-16 08:57:03)

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skirmish

Member

Registered: 2018-02-28

Posts: 9

Re: [SOLVED] Diagnose broken mkinitcpio.conf, please

Indeed, the problem was me seeing that the new default was sd-encrypt and dumbly thinking: I should switch, it is probably backwards compatible since it is the default.  Har, har, har, NO!

sd-encrypt requires completely different configuration as compared with encrypt.  Once I followed the Wiki to update bootloading options and created the right /etc/crypttab.initramfs, I can boot into the OS again.

Thanks for links!