Arch Linux

richt

Member

From: San Miguel de Allende, Mexico

Registered: 2020-12-27

Posts: 8

[SOLVED] New installation hangs at "Loading initial ramdisk..."

I installed arch from USB (archlinux-2025.11.01-x86_64.iso) to a partition of my Thinkpad X1 Carbon and included grub, efibootmgr and os-prober in the pacstrap command. Ubuntu is the only other OS but is not executing grub. At the end of the steps in the installation guide I configured grub as follows:

grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot --bootloader-id=Arch_GRUB
mount --mkdir /dev/nvme0n1p4 /ubuntu_root
Edited /etc/default/grub to uncomment:  GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=false
grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Rebooted and got Arch and Linux both in grub menu as expected but when arch is launched it gets stuck at "Loading initial ramdisk..."

I hard reset and checked the grub Arch Linux parameters and the referenced UUID’s for EFI (p1) and arch root (p6) are correct. I booted into USB live environment and /etc/mkinitcpio.conf HOOKS has only the executable line "HOOKS=(base udev autodetect microcode... fsck)" which I understand is correct. After mounting partitions and entering arch-chroot, I executed mkinitcpio -P and received error: file not found: '/etc/vconsole.conf', so I created it with text "KEYMAP=us". Executing "mkinitcpio -P" again did not result in any errors so I executed "grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg".

Still, when when arch is launched it gets stuck at "Loading initial ramdisk..."

Thanks in advance for any recommendations!

Last edited by richt (2025-11-14 21:22:32)

Scimmia

Fellow

Registered: 2012-09-01

Posts: 13,248

Re: [SOLVED] New installation hangs at "Loading initial ramdisk..."

It is not hanging at "Loading initial ramdisk...", you've just told it to hide everything else by using the 'quiet' kernel command line parameter. Get rid of that.

richt

Member

From: San Miguel de Allende, Mexico

Registered: 2020-12-27

Posts: 8

Re: [SOLVED] New installation hangs at "Loading initial ramdisk..."

Thanks Scimmia! That allowed me to see the boot output, and the real problem which prevented me from getting a login prompt (which I'll put in a new post).