Arch Linux

archiso7

Member

Registered: 2021-06-10

Posts: 10

Stuck at Loading initial ramdisk

I just managed to get arch to install on an iMac 5,1 from late 2006, but when I try to boot arch it gets stuck at

Loading initial ramdisk...

I have found other posts and forums with answers but they were all the same: "reinstall the kernel and grub". This did not work for me.

Does anyone here have any ideas?

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 21,665

Re: Stuck at Loading initial ramdisk

Where should this boot to? Into a terminal or some display manager? Can you try if you at least get to a console with nomodeset or rather when it gets stuck can you switch to an alternate TTY with e.g. Ctrl+Alt+F2 ? What hardware/graphics card is this? The free noveau driver has some issues reported with the 5.12 kernel and you might want to test linux-lts instead.

archiso7

Member

Registered: 2021-06-10

Posts: 10

Re: Stuck at Loading initial ramdisk

Where should this boot to? Into a terminal or some display manager? Can you try if you at least get to a console with nomodeset or rather when it gets stuck can you switch to an alternate TTY with e.g. Ctrl+Alt+F2 ? What hardware/graphics card is this? The free noveau driver has some issues reported with the 5.12 kernel and you might want to test linux-lts instead.

It should just boot to a terminal, and I think this iMac has a core2duo and radeon graphics(I don't know which one) and I am using linux-lts. I put debug in the grub cfg and the output shows that it seems to be waiting for /dev/sda3, which is the swap partition.

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 21,665

Re: Stuck at Loading initial ramdisk

Then you should fix your fstab so it also uses UUIDs, or rather do you get further if you just disable the swap partition?

archiso7

Member

Registered: 2021-06-10

Posts: 10

Re: Stuck at Loading initial ramdisk

Then you should fix your fstab so it also uses UUIDs, or rather do you get further if you just disable the swap partition?

I added nomodeset to the perams and got to a tty, now my problem is that gdm wont load and if I try to use startx it just errors out. When I run xrandr I get:

Can't open display

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 21,665

Re: Stuck at Loading initial ramdisk

yes nomodeset is just to check whether you get to a terminal, you can't start a GUI with it disabled. Post the log of a faulty boot, e.g.

sudo journalctl -b-1

will give you a system log from the boot prior: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/List_o … n_services

archiso7

Member

Registered: 2021-06-10

Posts: 10

Re: Stuck at Loading initial ramdisk

yes nomodeset is just to check whether you get to a terminal, you can't start a GUI with it disabled. Post the log of a faulty boot, e.g.

sudo journalctl -b-1

will give you a system log from the boot prior: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/List_o … n_services

log: http://ix.io/3pu9
I think that is with nomodeset

Last edited by archiso7 (2021-06-10 17:49:27)

archiso7

Member

Registered: 2021-06-10

Posts: 10

Re: Stuck at Loading initial ramdisk

without nomodeset and quiet the boot hangs on

Listening on Load/Save RF Kill Switch Status /dev/rfkill Watch.

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 21,665

Re: Stuck at Loading initial ramdisk

Then boot back in with it enabled and post the journal output corresponding to the failing boot. What you posted is with it enabled and thus doesn't really help.

archiso7

Member

Registered: 2021-06-10

Posts: 10

Re: Stuck at Loading initial ramdisk

Then boot back in with it enabled and post the journal output corresponding to the failing boot. What you posted is with it enabled and thus doesn't really help.

How do I get the output of a past boot?

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 21,665

Re: Stuck at Loading initial ramdisk

The command I gave you will get you the boot prior to the current one. If that doesn't exist then no log was written which wouldn't be good for trying to identify things. Does the Mac OS it shipped with still exist and does that work properly? to rule out a HW issue

Other commands can be found here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/System … ing_output

Last edited by V1del (2021-06-11 00:16:37)

archiso7

Member

Registered: 2021-06-10

Posts: 10

Re: Stuck at Loading initial ramdisk

The command I gave you will get you the boot prior to the current one. If that doesn't exist then no log was written which wouldn't be good for trying to identify things. Does the Mac OS it shipped with still exist and does that work properly? to rule out a HW issue

Other commands can be found here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/System … ing_output

Yes it works fine with MacOS.
Here is the log: http://ix.io/3pwp

EDIT: I just fixed the ati module problem by installing xf86-video-ati and the fbdev module by installing xf86-video-fbdev

EDIT: If I run startx with sudo it works.

Last edited by archiso7 (2021-06-11 01:08:52)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 21,665

Re: Stuck at Loading initial ramdisk

Don't run startx as root. That particular error is quite explainable. Add the radeon kernel module to your initramfs: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Kernel … _KMS_start

archiso7

Member

Registered: 2021-06-10

Posts: 10

Re: Stuck at Loading initial ramdisk

Don't run startx as root. That particular error is quite explainable. Add the radeon kernel module to your initramfs: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Kernel … _KMS_start

And then reboot with nomodeset or do I reboot without it?

EDIT: without nomodeset it just hangs at Loading initial ramdisk.

EDIT: with nomodeset I get to a tty but startx still doesn't work, here are the errors from the xorg log: http://ix.io/3pzg. Here is the full xorg log: http://ix.io/3pzh

Last edited by archiso7 (2021-06-11 13:36:34)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 21,665

Re: Stuck at Loading initial ramdisk

nomodeset is an emergency option for debugging, you can never get into any reasonable state of GUI with it on the params. Did you rebuild the initramfs with mkinitcpio after adding the radeon module?

Something else I'm seeing right now are a few firmware load errors, is linux-firmware installed?

Remove the xorg.conf.new. You don't need static configs and definitely not anything that's generated via Xorg -configure.

Last edited by V1del (2021-06-11 14:15:01)

archiso7

Member

Registered: 2021-06-10

Posts: 10

Re: Stuck at Loading initial ramdisk

nomodeset is an emergency option for debugging, you can never get into any reasonable state of GUI with it on the params. Did you rebuild the initramfs with mkinitcpio after adding the radeon module?

Remove the xorg.conf.new. You don't need static configs and definitely not anything that's generated via Xorg -configure.

ok, I forgot to remake the initramfs...

EDIT: without nomodeset I get stuck on (1 of 2) A start job is running for /dev/sda3 (5s/1min 30s), I'm going to try with debug on and see what shows up there

EDIT: with debug it shows that its hanging on fb0: switching to radeondrmfb from EFI VGA

Last edited by archiso7 (2021-06-11 14:54:50)

archiso7

Member

Registered: 2021-06-10

Posts: 10

Re: Stuck at Loading initial ramdisk

With nomodeset on it won't get past Loading initial ramdisk, I'm going to see what debug shows

EDIT: for some reason when I used debug and nomodeset it also got stuck on fb0: switching to radeondrmfb from EFI VGA

Last edited by archiso7 (2021-06-11 14:54:27)