Arch Linux

puvc

Member

Registered: 2025-09-06

Posts: 1

"/sbin/init does not exist, bailing out" when it does exist

Hello! I'm currently attempting to install Arch Linux on my laptop. Although I'm not experienced with it, I'm being guided by a friend who is. So I don't have any particularly fancy modifications e.g. RAID, LVM, encrypted root.

I've followed a standard installation, with the exception of having /, /usr and /home on separate partitions, with btrfs filesystems for each (perhaps this is inefficient), setting up suspend-to-disk and with encrypted /home (using /etc/crypttab).

Nothing went wrong for the majority of the process, other than the strange fact that mkinitcpio was not installed after pacstrap -K /mnt core linux linux-firmware, and that it at one point said no presets were found; these were fixed by some uninstalling and reinstalling packages.

Upon installing GRUB and regenerating the initramfs to accomodate the usr and resume hooks, the system refused to boot, giving the message:

ERROR: Root device mounted successfully, but /sbin/init does not exist.
Bailing out, you are on your own. Good luck.

This persisted after reinstalling GRUB and modifying the initramfs slightly. My current hooks are: base udev autodetect modconf block usr resume btrfs filesystems fsck.

However, strangely, /sbin/init does exist! At least, according to the minimal shell it dumped me into.

Using systemd instead of udev actually enabled the system to boot, but I encountered the following error instead:

[FAILED] Failed to start Switch Root.
You are in emergency mode. After logging in, type "journalctl -xb" to view system logs, "systemctl reboot" to reboot, or "exit" to continue bootup.

Cannot open access to console, the root account is locked.
See sulogin(8) man page for more details.

My GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT is "loglevel=3 quiet resume=UUID=<swap UUID>". Could anyone help?

Head_on_a_Stick

Member

From: The Wirral

Registered: 2014-02-20

Posts: 9,003

Website

Re: "/sbin/init does not exist, bailing out" when it does exist

having /, /usr and /home on separate partitions

https://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/s … is-broken/

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Jin, Jîyan, Azadî

IDKWhatToPutHere

Member

Registered: 2025-05-06

Posts: 24

Re: "/sbin/init does not exist, bailing out" when it does exist

Weird, separate /usr works totally fine for me (non-systemd initramfs). I thought including the usr hook would solve issues with it not being mounted at the right time?

seth

Member

From: Won't reply 2 private help req

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 75,172

Re: "/sbin/init does not exist, bailing out" when it does exist

Using systemd instead of udev actually enabled the system to boot

No.

including the usr hook would should™ solve issues with it not being mounted at the right time

@puvc what do "lsblk -f" and the generated fstab (/mnt/etc/fstab, not the /etc/fstab on the install iso) look like?
Do you get any other errors eg. about failing to mount /usr?

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