[SOLVED] Stuck at "Loading initial ramdisk..."

xanrer · 2022-01-16 17:54:03

Hello there, I was doing some testing in an arch virtual machine and installed a few packages such as yay, cde, nscde. pkgbrowser, cylon, yup. Also deleted icewm with -Rns which I installed before. I tried to open CDE from my desktop manager and it failed. So I decided to reboot. After reboot the startup got stuck at "Loading initial ramdisk..." text, I tried to switch to tty with a VirtualBox's soft keyboard but sadly that didn't work either. So I decided to boot the installation medium and checked cat /etc/fstab it returned nothing but some built-in comments. I don't know if that's normal with installation medium so I decided to ask here if I somehow deleted something. Also, I found a few other forum posts on exact same issue but it seems theirs was mostly due to efi problems or they had access to tty so not much help there.

Last edited by xanrer (2022-01-18 14:22:18)

zizu · 2022-01-16 18:06:17

Have you tried using the .iso and arch-chrooting into the system to use commands?

xanrer · 2022-01-16 18:28:12

I heard arch-chrooting in those other posts too but couldn't understand what to do with it, wiki constantly says `/location/of/new/root` but doesn't say where it should be. Where exactly should I arch-chroot?

Head_on_a_Stick · 2022-01-16 18:59:15

You should mount the root partition under (for example) /mnt and use that location in the arch-chroot command. Any other partitions should also be mounted under /mnt as appropriate before chrooting. How did you install Arch anyway? The method is the same as for the manual process.

And when describing what lead to your problem please provide exact commands rather than vague descriptions.

xanrer · 2022-01-16 19:28:33

> How did you install Arch anyway? The method is the same as for the manual process.

I blindly followed a guide without knowing much about what I'm doing. It may be one of those easy install things I'm sorry, I just did what's written.

> And when describing what lead to your problem please provide exact commands rather than vague descriptions.

pacman -S --needed git base-devel
git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/yay.git
cd yay
makepkg -si

yay -S cdesktopenv nscde pkgbrowser cylon yup
yay -Rns icewm

Then I log out to my desktop manager "ly"
Then I selected CDE and tried to log in, failed and reboot.

> You should mount the root partition under (for example) /mnt and use that location in the arch-chroot command. Any other partitions should also be mounted under /mnt as appropriate before chrooting.

/mnt is empty.

isaac_le · 2022-01-17 04:00:21

Use lsblk (or similiar thing) to list partition information
next, mount the correct partition to /mnt first: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/instal … le_systems
and then chroot: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/instal … ide#Chroot

Last edited by isaac_le (2022-01-17 04:05:00)

Comrade_Spider · 2022-01-17 04:17:26

xanrer wrote:

> You should mount the root partition under (for example) /mnt and use that location in the arch-chroot command. Any other partitions should also be mounted under /mnt as appropriate before chrooting.
/mnt is empty.

So the guide isn't saying to use that path. They are using a placeholder for the device partition for example my hard drive is /dev/sda and my Linux filesystem is /dev/sda2 (sda1 is my swap partition because I'm using MBR). What I would do in this situation is:

 mount /dev/sda2 /mnt

This would mount your root partition.

Then just run:

 arch-chroot /mnt

Keep in mind that if you are going back into the ISO to arch-chroot you will need to repeat this every time until you get your installation working.

Last edited by Comrade_Spider (2022-01-17 04:19:08)

xanrer · 2022-01-17 09:06:14

I mounted and chrooted successfully thanks to you guys. I checked if everything is or other with /boot by ls ing, it returned:
grub initramfs-linux.img vmlinuz-linux
So I guess no problem there.

Next I think about what may have caused this issue in the first place and maybe while I removing icewm with -Rns I removed something important too so i wrote pacman -S icewm and looked at the needed packages, it returned:
imlib2-1.7.5.1 libid3tag-0.15.1b-11
If any of these needed for boot please let me know.

I don't know what to do from here on, suggestions are appreciated.

edits:
oh also cat /etc/fstab returned:
UUID=ee32ba16-e6d2-4b96-a3e6-95bcdb2cfee3 / ext4 defaults,noatime 0 1
UUID=367048d3-aad8-41a9-abac-77f768c6806b swap swap defaults,noatime 0 0
Which is what is expected so everything is fine there.

cat grub.cfg returns: http://ix.io/3Mxx

I also checked journalctl sadly it only returns liveiso's logs so it's no use.

Last edited by xanrer (2022-01-17 09:37:04)

xanrer · 2022-01-17 12:53:37

So, I tried things myself and probably successfully nuked the system.

Here is what I did:
I suspect things may got broken because of some of the aur packages so I tried to access them with yay.
yay gave me this error "failed to read vcs file '/home/sage/.cache/yay/vcs.json'" so I looked up what could be done, they said "sudo rm -rf ~/.cache/yay/*" so I did and it started to work again. Albeit gave these errors while removing: https://i.ibb.co/ns60gNw/archrmrf.png
Then I did a "yay -Syyu" gave these errors: https://i.ibb.co/C0Q12tQ/archupdate.png at that point I started to suspect a system corruption due to packages. But I said install anyways. One of the things it installed was a new kernel.
After update I removed the liveiso and tried to boot the system, it gave me this message: https://i.ibb.co/DMD9XQ1/archnuke.png

I think grub got confused on what kernel to load I'm gonna fix that and brb.

edit:
Ran "grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg" and now it doesn't even show that message anymore: https://i.ibb.co/bKzXFXZ/archgrub.png
I don't want to fix this system anymore, installing again is probably would be easier, but I still want to know; What caused this?

Last edited by xanrer (2022-01-17 13:03:21)

Head_on_a_Stick · 2022-01-17 16:57:05

The 'grub>' prompt indicates that either grub.cfg cannot be found or that it has no menuentry stanzas. Use the 'set' command from the prompt and check the configfile parameter to see where it is looking.

xanrer · 2022-01-17 17:44:37

I think I understand what happened. The VM hard drive file somehow got corrupted. I tried to reinstall on the same hard drive file, deleting all the partitions and it still gave some errors that I don't remember right now. So I think it was a VirtualBox problem and not an Arch problem. I just created a new hard drive file and installed Arch again with the same packages, except for icewm and yay, which I changed with paru. Everything works as expected for now. Thank you to everyone who looked into the matter. I learned new things and that's a win in my book.

isaac_le · 2022-01-18 05:12:20

actually I'm having the same problem, when I updated to 5.16 (today is 5.16.1) it got stuck at "Loading initial ramdisk" without any journalctl log

http://ix.io/3MDs :

tail -n 500 /var/log/pacman.log

http://ix.io/3MDt (I boot 5.16 at 11:43):

journalctl --since 11:00

and then I switched from bootloader to systemd, the tty give me some message: http://ix.io/3MDq

I can boot Ok when rolling back to 5.15.13.

PC info: http://ix.io/3MDx

Last edited by isaac_le (2022-01-18 05:36:24)

seth · 2022-01-18 09:31:25

The OPs problem seems to have been a corrupt VM image, so probably unrelated and you should open an new thread, allowing the OP to mark this one as solved.

There're lots of IO errors on the Colorful SL300 128 GB SSD (sda) - do you have earlier messages than that?
Also see https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Genera … bug_output - the LTS kernel still boots fine?

isaac_le · 2022-01-18 12:50:15

New thread: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 1#p2016431

Arch Linux

#1 2022-01-16 17:54:03

[SOLVED] Stuck at "Loading initial ramdisk..."

#2 2022-01-16 18:06:17

Re: [SOLVED] Stuck at "Loading initial ramdisk..."

#3 2022-01-16 18:28:12

Re: [SOLVED] Stuck at "Loading initial ramdisk..."

#4 2022-01-16 18:59:15

Re: [SOLVED] Stuck at "Loading initial ramdisk..."

#5 2022-01-16 19:28:33

Re: [SOLVED] Stuck at "Loading initial ramdisk..."

#6 2022-01-17 04:00:21

Re: [SOLVED] Stuck at "Loading initial ramdisk..."

#7 2022-01-17 04:17:26

Re: [SOLVED] Stuck at "Loading initial ramdisk..."

#8 2022-01-17 09:06:14

Re: [SOLVED] Stuck at "Loading initial ramdisk..."

#9 2022-01-17 12:53:37

Re: [SOLVED] Stuck at "Loading initial ramdisk..."

#10 2022-01-17 16:57:05

Re: [SOLVED] Stuck at "Loading initial ramdisk..."

#11 2022-01-17 17:44:37

Re: [SOLVED] Stuck at "Loading initial ramdisk..."

#12 2022-01-18 05:12:20

Re: [SOLVED] Stuck at "Loading initial ramdisk..."

#13 2022-01-18 09:31:25

Re: [SOLVED] Stuck at "Loading initial ramdisk..."

#14 2022-01-18 12:50:15

Re: [SOLVED] Stuck at "Loading initial ramdisk..."

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