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I run into this curious problem of being stuck on the "Loading Operation System..." screen indefinitely. Originally I thought that my hardware failed on me, as I did not actually do anything with the PC the last time it booted normally. I was reminded by the sound of my neighbours leafblower that I wanted to dedust the hardware, so I shut it down again, grabbed a can of compressed air and carried everything outside. Once that was done and everything was wired up again my PC stuck in a reboot loop and eventually settled on just being stuck at "Loading Operation System..." indefinitely. No error messages, nothing else.
Booting from an old installation medium works fine, nothing hints towards hardware damages. The harddrives can be mounted normally, precautious backup of userdata did not show any signs of corrupted data and btrfsck did not find any errors. I just cannot boot my system anymore. I would like to post some more information but I am not really sure what could be relevant and where to look for this. Everything worked fine the last time the system was running which was pretty much just a boot followed by a shutdown.
Maybe something randomly corrupted GRUB/mbr? I am aware that this post might be a bit rambly but the problem hit me out of the blue and I have no idea where to actually look for it (or the solution). Is there a reliable way to verify and repair an Arch installation? If not I might just blank the drive with the system and do a fresh install but at this stage that still seems like overkill...
Cheers!
Last edited by NorPhi (2021-04-11 14:04:13)
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The "leaf blower" story doesn't really give us any information - describe your setup in detail: BIOS or UEFI? Bootloader? GRUB? Encrypted drives? Dual boot? With a LiveCD, inspect the bootloader/efi partition. Perhaps you messed up something with the bootloader?
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Pretty much the standard installation on an older system, bios, mbr, grub, no encryption, no other functioning other systems (one drive contained an old arch linux installation I forgot about but it was always there and never caused any issues, frankly I forgot that the drive existed). The only odd thing about my installation is btrfs but that's probably not even odd anymore...
All the logs did not contain anything that would hint towards the problem. As I said, I did not really do anything the last time the PC was running, I just shut it down again.
From the usb boot I checked the hardware - nothing seems to be damaged, I checked the mbr - also seems ok. I chrooted to the installation and reinstalled grub, still no boot. At some point I deleted the partition containing the forgotten installation, also nothing.
Now that I was getting into the hardware I changed the boot order in the bios and that apparently fixed it. No idea why it would have been off in the first place. Shouldn't the bios just continue with the next drive if there is nothing to boot? Overall a weird experience. Still not sure if I should consider this as a solved hardware issue or if I need to worry that all this points towards an underlying bigger problem...
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