(Laptop AMD) unusable blank screen after boot

Big Scorpio · 2026-08-15 19:09:54

Hello Arch Friends,

After my Arch (CachyOS) boots past Grub, I see the 2 lines about Cachyos-lts being initialized and what should come after is either the initialization text with the [LOADED] things OR the splash screen but at that moment my display goes black completely. The only keyboard inputs it reacts to is CTRL+ALT+DEL. CTRL+ALT+F{1-4} does nothing. I can toggle numpad however.

I decided to try CachyOS (an Arch Linux derivative) and i installed it through pacstrap (not the built-in installer because i require LVM on LUKS FDE and calamaris is useless for that) and specified the cachyos kernel in the installation steps. I also installed the mesa and vulkan drivers for my AMD GPU.

I can arch-chroot into it through CachyOS live-usb with a working KDE Plasma DE, which works but only if I boot into it not in normal mode but in grub2 mode (???).

[root@CachyOS tempp]# lspci -k | grep -A 2 -i vga
05:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Renoir [Radeon Vega Series / Radeon Vega Mobile Series] (rev c2)
        DeviceName: Onboard IGD

I installed the AMD drivers as far as i can tell.

[root@CachyOS tempp]# pacman -Q mesa vulkan-radeon
mesa 1:26.1.7-1
vulkan-radeon 1:26.1.7-1
[root@CachyOS tempp]# pacman -Q wayland sddm plasma-desktop
wayland 1.26.0-1
sddm 0.21.0-7
plasma-desktop 6.7.4-1
[root@CachyOS tempp]# 
[root@CachyOS tempp]# pacman -Q | grep achy
cachyos-keyring 20240331-1
cachyos-mirrorlist 27-1
linux-cachyos 7.1.6-1
linux-cachyos-headers 7.1.6-1
linux-cachyos-lts 6.18.42-1

I tried some grub kernel parameters and a mkinitcpio config change but neither had any different effect on my issue.

### /etc/default/grub
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="loglevel=3 quiet cryptdevice=UUID=9a7110f5-fead-b5a1-8ac1-514ef2dd2a32:cryptroot amdgpu.dc=1 amdgpu.sg_display=0 amdgpu.gpu_recovery=1 pci=noaer"

### mkinitcpio.conf
MODULES=(f2fs amdgpu)
HOOKS=(base udev systemd autodetect microcode modconf block kms keyboard keymap consolefont encrypt lvm2 sd-vconsole block filesystems fsck)

I don't get it. Was it a mistake to install CachyOS through pacstrap (and then follow the Arch guides) or what? It's not like the laptop is a useless piece of scrap metal but it sure doesn't act all that friendly towards Linux as with the other several machines I had previously.

It uses an AMD Ryzen 7 4700U with integrated GPU (Zen 2, Revoir)

Journalctl -> https://pastes.io/75t79ZwP

According to an AI LLM, my system has working drivers but it fails to detect my display at the VBIOS level and it recommends me to fall back to software rendering to see if it works (?).

What am i missing?

seth · 2026-08-15 19:52:02

After my Arch (CachyOS)

https://bbs.archlinux.org/misc.php?action=rules
CachyOS is not your Arch but your CachyOS

https://pastes.io/75t79ZwP wrote:

{"message":"Raw access is restricted to paid users"}

1st link below - don't use shitty pastebin scams.

Aug 15 20:15:18 CachyOS kernel: caller [REDACTED LIKELY SECRET] [amdgpu] mapping multiple BARs
Aug 15 20:15:55 CachyOS systemd[1]: Started dbus-:[REDACTED EMAIL].

lol

This here is your problem:

Aug 15 20:15:18 CachyOS kernel: amdgpu 0000:05:00.0: Invalid PCI ROM header signature: expecting 0xaa55, got 0xffff
Aug 15 20:15:18 CachyOS kernel: amdgpu 0000:05:00.0: Unable to locate a BIOS ROM
Aug 15 20:15:18 CachyOS kernel: amdgpu 0000:05:00.0: Fatal error during GPU init
Aug 15 20:15:18 CachyOS kernel: amdgpu 0000:05:00.0: finishing device.
Aug 15 20:15:18 CachyOS kernel: amdgpu 0000:05:00.0: MODE2 reset
Aug 15 20:15:18 CachyOS systemd[1]: Starting Enable Persistent Storage in systemd-networkd...
Aug 15 20:15:18 CachyOS kernel: amdgpu 0000:05:00.0: asic reset on amdgpu_device_ip_fini_early failed
Aug 15 20:15:18 CachyOS kernel: amdgpu 0000:05:00.0: probe with driver amdgpu failed with error -22

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 1#p1790611 was because the system is in legacy BIOS mode.
You can probably boot "nomodeset" - but w/o GPU hardware acceleration.

Edit: also https://forum.endeavouros.com/t/solved- … l/41991/19 but on the other hand https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 1#p2039171

Last edited by seth (2026-08-15 19:54:02)

Arch Linux

#1 2026-08-15 19:09:54

(Laptop AMD) unusable blank screen after boot

#2 2026-08-15 19:52:02

Re: (Laptop AMD) unusable blank screen after boot

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