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#1 2020-09-10 02:24:54

birdmun
Member
Registered: 2020-09-10
Posts: 2

hung on "Loading Initial Ramdisk"

I have a Dell E521 tower with an AMD processor, 8GB ram, 256GB SSD and integrated nVidia video. I managed to get the install bootstrapped from the live media. efibootmgr shows no efi. That suggests to me the system is in fact legacy bios.
I have edited the linux line in grub with nomodeset. I have removed quiet. I have replaced quiet with splash. I have tried nomodeset nouveau.nomodeset=0. I have set logging to 7. All of this was to no avail. I have not gotten any more output from the system when I try booting it. One other mention was that a legacy system might take time to boot a large initramfs file, so, I let it sit overnight with no luck.
I saw suggestions to try other bootloaders. lilo is one I recognize from back in the day. It failed to install. I even tried an LTS kernel.
I have not had this much trouble installing Arch on a system to date. I have only installed it on about 3 systems so far.
I have not tried other distros yet. I would much prefer to get Arch installed and running. This is my mother's system and I really want to get it running for her soon.

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#2 2020-09-10 12:56:22

merlock
Member
Registered: 2018-10-30
Posts: 233

Re: hung on "Loading Initial Ramdisk"

You might need to manually enable UEFI in your BIOS.

Check Dell support.


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#3 2020-09-10 16:14:10

eznix
Member
Registered: 2020-06-29
Posts: 25

Re: hung on "Loading Initial Ramdisk"

The Dell E521 is a fairly old computer. I have owned that model and found it very picky about which Linux distro would run on that machine. There is no UEFI in the and the manual specifies a 4Gb maximum RAM for the machine. You may need an older version of Linux to run on that thing. Sometimes mixing the latest and greatest software with ancient hardware is not always a viable solution. Sorry.

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#4 2020-09-10 16:23:44

d_fajardo
Member
Registered: 2017-07-28
Posts: 1,563

Re: hung on "Loading Initial Ramdisk"

birdmum wrote:

I managed to get the install bootstrapped from the live media.

I have no experience with bootstrapping. Can you explain how you did this? It might shed light on the processes that happened.

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#5 2020-09-10 17:46:28

Lone_Wolf
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From: Netherlands, Europe
Registered: 2005-10-04
Posts: 11,868

Re: hung on "Loading Initial Ramdisk"

efibootmgr shows no efi. That suggests to me the system is in fact legacy bios.

The officiall installation guide describes a simple way to determine that.
How did you install archlinux ?


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#6 2020-09-10 23:06:15

birdmun
Member
Registered: 2020-09-10
Posts: 2

Re: hung on "Loading Initial Ramdisk"

@d_fajardo: I used the word bootstrapping to mean I installed from the installation media. Since the media isn't a livecd like other distros I just used it to install the OS as one does.
@Lone_Wolf: I partitioned the drive. I installed base base-devel linux linux-firmware linux-lts nano. I set timezone, locale, installed grub, added fstab, and then attempted to boot from the hard drive. Grub is working as it comes up.
@eznix: I too saw the stated RAM limitation and have seen others install more with no issue. All 8GB is recognized.

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#7 2020-09-10 23:57:48

d_fajardo
Member
Registered: 2017-07-28
Posts: 1,563

Re: hung on "Loading Initial Ramdisk"

Grub is working as it comes up.

But it is not locating the initial ram disk. Did you generate grub configuration while in chroot? Can you post your grub.cfg?( You have to chroot obviously to do that.)

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#8 2020-09-11 01:00:04

GaKu999
Member
From: US/Eastern
Registered: 2020-06-21
Posts: 696

Re: hung on "Loading Initial Ramdisk"

I used the word bootstrapping to mean I installed from the installation media. Since the media isn't a livecd like other distros I just used it to install the OS as one does.

Are you talking about archiso? The live isohybrid?
It is a livecd, and a very capable one...

Did you follow the official installation guide?
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Installation_guide

Are you using archiso?
https://www.archlinux.org/download/


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