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#1 2020-02-11 00:22:31

fenreer
Member
Registered: 2020-02-10
Posts: 4

MSI Alpha 15 A3DDK halts while loading initial ramdisk

Let me start by stating what I've already tried:
- Installing Arch from scratch, following the installation guide, at least three separate times.
- Mounting the efi partition (flagged properly) as /boot
- Mounting the efi partition as /boot/efi (and copying the kernel etc. to that dir).
- Installing grub with microupdates.
- Installing grub without microupdates.
- Installing systemd-boot with microupdates.
- Installing EndeavorOS without changing any settings.

All of these resulted in the same behavior mentioned in the title.

After I bought this laptop I installed a Samsung 970 pro evo ssd (1TB) nvme as my only disk, a linux-friendly wifi card, and 64gb of quality ram. The laptop booted right up to Windows 10 upon receiving it, so I'm sure I didn't get a lemon.

How would I go about troubleshooting what's wrong? When it halts it hasn't loaded the kernel and the instructions set appears to just stop altogether. No keystroked register, all I can do is hold down the power button until the device powers off.

I find this strange because the arch usb iso boots fine (with two errors indicating missing firmware for this specific laptop's backlighting controls and one other non-critical feature.

I'm fairly technical and I use a bsd variant (MacOS X) every day at work, but I've never had to troubleshoot a problem after POST but before the kernel is loaded.

Any suggestions? Thanks in advance!

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#2 2020-02-11 00:52:18

gnox
Member
Registered: 2013-05-18
Posts: 81

Re: MSI Alpha 15 A3DDK halts while loading initial ramdisk

I remember that in a msi laptop that I had, I had to change in the bios from uefi to legacy boot.

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#3 2020-02-11 01:56:40

fenreer
Member
Registered: 2020-02-10
Posts: 4

Re: MSI Alpha 15 A3DDK halts while loading initial ramdisk

I'll try that when I get home, thanks!

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#4 2020-02-11 17:46:17

fenreer
Member
Registered: 2020-02-10
Posts: 4

Re: MSI Alpha 15 A3DDK halts while loading initial ramdisk

Changing to a legacy boot setup resulted in the same behavior. I think the initramfs is choking on this laptop for whatever reason, ragardless of how the system invokes it.

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#5 2020-04-12 03:37:34

Lanz
Member
From: Ontario, Canada
Registered: 2015-01-24
Posts: 11

Re: MSI Alpha 15 A3DDK halts while loading initial ramdisk

Hello. Just wondering if you ever got this working, and if so, how well does it work?

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#6 2020-04-12 03:58:15

fenreer
Member
Registered: 2020-02-10
Posts: 4

Re: MSI Alpha 15 A3DDK halts while loading initial ramdisk

Lanz: After further testing I concluded that in my case the issue never occurred when I dropped into BIOS just after POST, then chose to boot the machine from BIOS. Booting "normally" without entering BIOS first resulted in 100% failures. I gave up on that laptop for Linux and decided to run Windows instead.

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