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Hello!
I have arch installed on an external SSD (which I use with a laptop) and it had been working fine for months, before one day it suddenly froze on start up just before the login screen (Specifically where it says file system has been mounted cleanly. At which point it just hung. Sorry no pic). At this time I had made no major changes to the system, other than simply upgrading via pacman on a regular basis, and the timing of this error suggests to me that it was not related to any upgrade.
Shortly afterward, without me making any changes, it began working again. However, I wanted to check my backup arch install, which is installed on a 32GB USB stick, and is essentially the same as the SSD install (I rsync from the latter to the former to keep it up to date).
Booting up the USB install I got this error:
(Apologies for the pic, the part cut off just says 'Aborted')
I tried several times to see if anything changed, but just got the same error.
I went with the assumption that I had somehow corrupted the boot files/partition, and decided to boot up the Arch Installation Medium (which I have on another USB stick) and try to reinstall Grub.
However, on starting up the Installation Medium I got this error: (NOTE: Grub on the Installation Medium worked fine, the following error came after Grub)
I tried two more times with much the same result, and then, with not much else to do, I tried putting it in a different USB slot. To my surprise, it worked! Well, almost worked.
Here it is loading up: (NOTE: the error)
And then it got this far:
From here it may look as if its working, however my external keyboard was no longer functioning. NOTE: during the Grub phase of the boot, the external keyboard WAS working. It only stopped working after booting into the installation medium (The associated error is visiible in the pics)
Again, I tried a couple of boots to see if it would fix itself, but although it managed to get through boot, my keyboard refused to function.
At this stage, I'm going to refrain from doing anything else until I get some feedback, as I don't want to make anything worse.
I very much suspect that my laptop (~5 years old) is dying, and that this is at the root of all the above problems; HOWEVER: The one thing that leaves me uncertain about this, is that Windows (which is installed on one of the hard disks in the laptop) works fine. I only use Windows for gaming, everything else I do on linux, so I don't know how relevant this is, but that's as far as I've got.
Would very much appreciate some feedback, if there's anything I can try please let me know and I'll do my best to try it.
Thanks
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Definitely reeks of a hardware issue. I would suspect RAM. If you have more than one RAM board installed, you could try and remove one at a time (with your computer turned off, sorry if that's obvious, never know how much people know) and retry to see if the problem goes away.
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