Arch Linux

richt

Member

From: San Miguel de Allende, Mexico

Registered: 2020-12-27

Posts: 8

New installation boot stuck: Starting/Started D-Bus System Message Bus

I installed arch from USB (archlinux-2025.11.01-x86_64.iso) to a partition of my Thinkpad X1 Carbon and included a number of additional packages in the pacstrap command: base linux linux-firmware intel-ucode vim nano iwd dhcpcd man-db man-pages texinfo links sof-firmware grub efibootmgr os-prober

On boot, the notifications cycle indefinitely  between Starting and Started D-Bus System Message Bus…

Some research suggested that problem might be conflicting services so I booted into USB live environment, arch-chrooted to my root partition and executed: ls -l /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/

Services listed are ModemManager, choose-mirror, hv_fcopy_daemon (this is in red), hv_kvp_daemon, hv_vss_daemon, iwd, livecd-talk, machines, pacman-init, remote-cryptsetup, remote-fs, remote-integritysetup, remote-veritysetup, sshd, systemd-homed, systemd-networkd, systemd-resolved, vboxservice, vmtoolsd, vmware-vmblock-fuse

Seemed like a lot of extraneous services (which might have resulted from including so many packages in my initial installation?) so I disabled all but iwd, machines.target, sshd, systemd-homed and systemd-resolved. But that didn't resolve my problem, as the boot is stuck cycling between Starting and Started D-Bus System Message Bus…

Thanks in advance for any recommendations!

jonno2002

Member

Registered: 2016-11-21

Posts: 834

Re: New installation boot stuck: Starting/Started D-Bus System Message Bus

those services are enabled on the installation media, your obviously not chrooted correctly or you did somthing really wrong during installation process, id say since this is a new install just start fresh and follow the guide carefully

svenne_k

Member

Registered: 2025-11-26

Posts: 1

Re: New installation boot stuck: Starting/Started D-Bus System Message Bus

As a datapoint, I have the same problem with a newly installed (and newly purchased) machine.

Installed by hand (and by memory) from 2025.11.01 iso, not with archinstall:
- systemd-boot
- lvm2 on luks
- btrfs subvol (@) on / (and subvols for /home and /var)
- uki (never got to enroll private secure boot keys though)
- both sd-encrypt and encrypt based flows tried (which either /etc/crypttab.initramfs or cryptdevice= as needed)
- pacstrap packages: base base-devel linux linux-firmware lvm2 cryptsetup btrfs-progs iwd

The first (now wiped) install also failed in a new and interesting way, with "pcr machined" forcing reboot during boot (which I "fixed temporarily" by masking the service).

For context, I have installed tens if not hundreds of archlinuxes (physical hardware, vms etc) during the last decade or so, both by hand and various homemade scripts.

I have quickly run through the guide (for reference) and didn't see any material derivation on my part.

Install media boots fine and archinstall'ed version (tried after first install wiped) also runs fine (but cannot setup sane lvm2 setup). I will retry tonight and see if I can find the problem (but I never had this problem before, or the pcr problem).

seth

Member

From: Don't DM me only for attention

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 70,959

Re: New installation boot stuck: Starting/Started D-Bus System Message Bus

Can you boot the multi-user.target - in doubt along "nomodeset"?

lvm2 on luks

nb. that the mkinitcpio default changed from busybox to systemd which has different requirements here, https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=310004

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