Arch Linux

Sourav

Member

From: India

Registered: 2019-04-22

Posts: 84

Website

[Solved] System freezes at 'Loading initial ramdisk ...'

After updating my laptop (full update) recently, every single mouse and keyboard freezes when Xorg starts.
I don't see errors in journalctl logs, but in /var/log/Xorg.0.log I see this:

[ 89.209] (II) modeset(0): Damage tracking initialized
[ 89.209] (II) modeset(0): Setting screen physical size to 508 x 285
[ 89.291] (EE) dbus-core: error connecting to system bus: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.FileNotFound (Failed to connect to socket /run/dbus/system_bus_socket: No such file or directory)

The error is cat out after chrooting. In general my system freezes after "Loading initial ramdisk ..."

I use modesetting driver and mesa for Intel Skylake laptop CPU, and no xf86-video-intel is installed, although system has xf86-input-libinput and xf86-video-vesa installed.

This issue popped up only after an update. I restored a backup I had and system booted fine, and updated again and got that glitch again.

EDIT
After chrooting and disabling lxdm service, system seems to still stuck, things like the caps lock light doesn't work either.

Last edited by Sourav (2024-01-21 21:14:46)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 24,759

Re: [Solved] System freezes at 'Loading initial ramdisk ...'

which dbus implementation did you pick when prompted and did you actually reboot after picking something?

A system dbus should basically always be present, a full

sudo journalctl -b

when up to date?

Sourav

Member

From: India

Registered: 2019-04-22

Posts: 84

Website

Re: [Solved] System freezes at 'Loading initial ramdisk ...'

I picked up the default 1, which was "dbus-broker-units".

journalctl -b is currently empty (added Storage=persistent after update, before rebooting)

I rebooted only after the entire update was completed (used "yay")

Last edited by Sourav (2024-01-21 01:51:49)

Sourav

Member

From: India

Registered: 2019-04-22

Posts: 84

Website

Re: [Solved] System freezes at 'Loading initial ramdisk ...'

Looks like new journal logs aren't captured as the system complely freezes and I have to long press the power button to shut down the laptop forcefully. I can't imagine a way to try to find what's wrong.

Last edited by Sourav (2024-01-21 02:09:49)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 24,759

Re: [Solved] System freezes at 'Loading initial ramdisk ...'

Is it up to the kernel, can you still boot if you install linux-lts and try booting that instead of 6.7 ?

Sourav

Member

From: India

Registered: 2019-04-22

Posts: 84

Website

Re: [Solved] System freezes at 'Loading initial ramdisk ...'

@V1del, turns out the issue wasn't related to Arch updates but a misconfiguration on my new SSD during backup and restore.

I used cp -a /lib/ target (along with other directories from a running system) which incorrectly copied the directory contents instead of preserving the symlink. Post-copy, everything worked until I updated and then realized that /lib/ didn't receive updates since it wasn't a symlink anymore.

The problem surfaced when installing linux and linux-zen kernels, with missing /lib/modules/ errors, despite pacman -Ql showing files in /usr/lib.

After discovering that /lib/, /lib64/, /bin/, and /sbin/ weren't symlinks after restoring the backup, I removed these directories and correctly recreated the symlinks.

To confirm no packages were using /lib/, /lib64/, /bin/, /sbin/ I ran:

$ pacman -Ql | grep '^[^ ]* /lib'
filesystem /lib
filesystem /lib64

$ pacman -Ql | awk '$2 ~ /^\/bin/'
filesystem /bin

$ pacman -Ql | awk '$2 ~ /^\/sbin/'
filesystem /sbin

No current packages except filesystem reference /lib or /lib64 and other misconfigured directories, so the system seems fine now. It's running without issues. Sorry to be a bother.

Last edited by Sourav (2024-01-21 14:30:08)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 24,759

Re: [Solved] System freezes at 'Loading initial ramdisk ...'

No worries, this can happen, please mark as [SOLVED] by editing the title in your first post/maybe adjusting it so the real cause is directly identified