[SOLVED] seem to have an initramfs problem

newme360 · 2026-07-19 14:54:49

Hi all,

My laptop seems to have a corrupted initramfs. I ended up spending almost the entire Friday trying to fix it but didn't get it sorted so I'm posting here to try to see if I could get some help.

On Thursday evening I tried to boot up my laptop and it got stuck after the grub menu with " Booting 'Arch Linux', Loading Linux linux..., Loading initial ramdisk..." and that's it. I tried to select the fallback initramfs in the grub menu, but that ends in a kernel panic.

On Friday I ended up looking through the arch wiki and the forums for some help and found that this could be caused by an incomplete update, although I don't remember doing an update the last time I was using my laptop, and that I should use mkinitcpio to fix the corrupted initramfs.

I ended up booting the laptop from a live arch usb and noticed that if I listed the contents of /boot on the hard drive of the computer (mounted to /mnt) that it showed "EFI" and "grub" (folders) and "initramfs-linux.img" and "vmlinuz-linux" (files). Now, when I than mounted the efi partition to (/mnt)/boot all these files and folders disappeared and left only a single "EFI" folder with a "grub" folder and with in it grubx64.efi. Although I tried to cat grubx64.efi, but it gave me gibberish.

I also tried to use arch-chroot and run mkinitcpio -p linux to rebuild the initramfs, but it didn't work. the error it gave was "==
> ERROR: Invalid option -k -- '/boot/vmlinuz-linux' must be readable".

I also tried in the chroot environment to do a system update, but that errored out due to insufficient space.

If anyone has some advice I would appreciate it

Last edited by newme360 (Yesterday 18:30:16)

seth · 2026-07-19 15:25:04

Can you boot the multi-user.target (2nd link below), in doubt along "nomodeset"?
Also (in case) remove any "quiet" parameter, rather see https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Genera … l_messages

live arch usb and noticed that if I listed the contents of /boot on the hard drive of the computer (mounted to /mnt) that it showed "EFI" and "grub" (folders) and "initramfs-linux.img" and "vmlinuz-linux" (files). Now, when I than mounted the efi partition to (/mnt)/boot all these files and folders disappeared

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/System … al_to_view
Also from the install iso (*before* any chrooting!)

lsblk -f

newme360 · 2026-07-19 16:30:09

Hi,

Thank you for your reply.

After removing the 'quiet' parameter it seems to show that its getting a lot further in the boot process than I had originality thought. The system seems to be reaching target multi-user and getting stuck at target graphical interface.

As for joirnalctl output:

 root@archiso ~ # journalctl -D /mnt/var/log/journal -e
Jul 19 13:40:45 archpc systemd[1]: systemd-remount-fs.service: Deactivated successfully.
Jul 19 13:40:45 archpc systemd[1]: Stopped Remount Root and Kernel File Systems.
Jul 19 13:40:45 archpc systemd[1]: systemd-fsck-root.service: Deactivated successfully.
Jul 19 13:40:45 archpc systemd[1]: Stopped File System Check on Root Device.
Jul 19 13:40:45 archpc systemd[1]: tmp.mount: Deactivated successfully.
Jul 19 13:40:45 archpc systemd[1]: Unmounted Temporary Directory /tmp.
Jul 19 13:40:45 archpc systemd[1]: Stopped target Swaps.
Jul 19 13:40:45 archpc systemd[1]: Deactivating swap /dev/disk/by-designator/swap...
Jul 19 13:40:45 archpc systemd[1]: dev-disk-by\x2did-mmc\x2dDF4064_0x5b861202\x2dpart2.swap: Deactivated successfully.
Jul 19 13:40:45 archpc systemd[1]: Deactivated swap /dev/disk/by-id/mmc-DF4064_0x5b861202-part2.
Jul 19 13:40:45 archpc systemd[1]: dev-disk-by\x2dpartuuid-a19dc1a6\x2d4ae9\x2dde4d\x2dbc2f\x2d31847e0693a2.swap: Deactivated successfully.
Jul 19 13:40:45 archpc systemd[1]: Deactivated swap /dev/disk/by-partuuid/a19dc1a6-4ae9-de4d-bc2f-31847e0693a2.
Jul 19 13:40:45 archpc systemd[1]: dev-disk-by\x2ddiskseq-2\x2dpart2.swap: Deactivated successfully.
Jul 19 13:40:45 archpc systemd[1]: Deactivated swap /dev/disk/by-diskseq/2-part2.
Jul 19 13:40:45 archpc systemd[1]: dev-disk-by\x2ddesignator-swap.swap: Deactivated successfully.
Jul 19 13:40:45 archpc systemd[1]: Deactivated swap /dev/disk/by-designator/swap.
Jul 19 13:40:45 archpc systemd[1]: dev-mmcblk1p2.swap: Deactivated successfully.
Jul 19 13:40:45 archpc systemd[1]: Deactivated swap /dev/mmcblk1p2.
Jul 19 13:40:45 archpc systemd[1]: dev-disk-by\x2duuid-3cb40b89\x2d362e\x2d46fc\x2d9abf\x2ddaf06da28beb.swap: Deactivated successfully.
Jul 19 13:40:45 archpc systemd[1]: Deactivated swap /dev/disk/by-uuid/3cb40b89-362e-46fc-9abf-daf06da28beb.
Jul 19 13:40:45 archpc systemd[1]: lvm2-monitor.service: Deactivated successfully.
Jul 19 13:40:45 archpc systemd[1]: Stopped Monitoring of LVM2 mirrors, snapshots etc. using dmeventd or progress polling.
Jul 19 13:40:45 archpc systemd[1]: Reached target Unmount All Filesystems.
Jul 19 13:40:45 archpc mkinitcpio[686]: ==> Build complete.
Jul 19 13:40:45 archpc systemd[1]: mkinitcpio-generate-shutdown-ramfs.service: Deactivated successfully.
Jul 19 13:40:45 archpc systemd[1]: Finished Generate shutdown-ramfs.
Jul 19 13:40:45 archpc systemd[1]: Reached target System Shutdown.
Jul 19 13:40:45 archpc systemd[1]: Reached target Late Shutdown Services.
Jul 19 13:40:45 archpc systemd[1]: systemd-reboot.service: Deactivated successfully.
Jul 19 13:40:45 archpc systemd[1]: Finished System Reboot.
Jul 19 13:40:45 archpc systemd[1]: Reached target System Reboot.
Jul 19 13:40:45 archpc systemd[1]: Shutting down.
Jul 19 13:40:45 archpc systemd[1]: Using hardware watchdog /dev/watchdog0: 'wdat_wdt', version 0.
Jul 19 13:40:45 archpc systemd[1]: Watchdog running with a hardware timeout of 10min.
Jul 19 13:40:45 archpc kernel: watchdog: watchdog0: watchdog did not stop!
Jul 19 13:40:45 archpc systemd-shutdown[1]: Using hardware watchdog /dev/watchdog0: 'wdat_wdt', version 0.
Jul 19 13:40:45 archpc systemd-shutdown[1]: Watchdog running with a hardware timeout of 10min.
Jul 19 13:40:45 archpc systemd-shutdown[1]: Syncing filesystems and block devices.
Jul 19 13:40:45 archpc systemd-shutdown[1]: Sending SIGTERM to remaining processes...
Jul 19 13:40:45 archpc systemd-journald[225]: Journal stopped
lines 961-1000/1000 (END)

And lsblk -f outputs:

 NAME         FSTYPE   FSVER            LABEL       UUID                                 FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINTS
loop0        squashfs 4.0                                                                     0   100% /run/archiso/airootfs
sda          iso9660  Joliet Extension ARCH_202605 2026-05-01-06-05-08-00
├─sda1       iso9660  Joliet Extension ARCH_202605 2026-05-01-06-05-08-00
└─sda2       vfat     FAT32            ARCHISO_EFI 69F4-4294
mmcblk0
├─mmcblk0p1  vfat     FAT32                        5513-B83B
├─mmcblk0p2  swap     1                            3cb40b89-362e-46fc-9abf-daf06da28beb
└─mmcblk0p3  ext4     1.0                          fccba00e-8da1-4cf6-be61-6dea55280849       0    95% /mnt
mmcblk0boot0
mmcblk0boot1

I sshed into the live usb...

newme360 · 2026-07-19 16:31:26

I guess now I'm going to try to boot without the gui and see where I get.

newme360 · 2026-07-19 18:06:59

So, I've managed to boot after removing the 'quiet' parameter and been able to get into a tty (ctrl+alt+f2) and change the default systemd target to multi-user.target, and now it boots normally, all be it not to a gui.

I guess now the question is why the system wont boot into graphical.target.

One thing I tried is to do a full system update, but it errors out with that there is no more disk space. I wonder if that has anything to do with the computer not making it to graphical.target.

Anyway hope to see if i can get some stuff moved off the drive, get an update done, and see where things are holding.

seth · 2026-07-19 19:08:16

lines 961-1000/1000 (END)

That's just the tail of the shutdown.

Please post your complete system journal for a failing boot, eg

sudo journalctl -b  -1 | curl -s -H "Accept: application/json, */*" --upload-file - 'https://paste.c-net.org/'

for the previous ("-1") one.

newme360 · 2026-07-19 20:43:56

journalctl -b -11 (before the problem) https://paste.c-net.org/PeggyFlags
journalctl -b -10 (the last time normally booting the computer) https://paste.c-net.org/TrifleTurning
journalctl -b -09 (when I tried to boot the computer but it didnt work) https://paste.c-net.org/ReverseLibyan

seth · 2026-07-19 20:46:16

Jul 15 20:23:48 archpc systemd[1]: lightdm.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE
Jul 15 20:23:48 archpc systemd[1]: lightdm.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
Jul 15 20:23:48 archpc systemd[1]: lightdm.service: Consumed 910ms CPU time over 3.929s wall clock time, 104.5M memory peak.
Jul 15 20:23:48 archpc systemd[1]: lightdm.service: Scheduled restart job, restart counter is at 1.

Lightdm and Xorg logs are in /var/log

newme360 · 2026-07-19 21:05:23

Thank you very much for your help.

So after clearing the packages cache (which had filled up my drive), doing a system update, and changing the default target back to graphical.target the computer boots into xfce and the system seems fine.

I will be honest I'd love to understand what happened, but if that's too much to ask for I understand.

seth · 2026-07-19 21:12:24

The Xorg.0.log.old might still hold a clue, otherwise that information was likely lost w/ the udpated lightdm log.

newme360 · 2026-07-19 21:20:24

I've had a look at Xorg.0.log.old and it seems not to have anything interesting in it. Probably did get lost, as the logs seemed pretty new..

Anyway thank you very much

Arch Linux

#1 2026-07-19 14:54:49

[SOLVED] seem to have an initramfs problem

#2 2026-07-19 15:25:04

Re: [SOLVED] seem to have an initramfs problem

#3 2026-07-19 16:30:09

Re: [SOLVED] seem to have an initramfs problem

#4 2026-07-19 16:31:26

Re: [SOLVED] seem to have an initramfs problem

#5 2026-07-19 18:06:59

Re: [SOLVED] seem to have an initramfs problem

#6 2026-07-19 19:08:16

Re: [SOLVED] seem to have an initramfs problem

#7 2026-07-19 20:43:56

Re: [SOLVED] seem to have an initramfs problem

#8 2026-07-19 20:46:16

Re: [SOLVED] seem to have an initramfs problem

#9 2026-07-19 21:05:23

Re: [SOLVED] seem to have an initramfs problem

#10 2026-07-19 21:12:24

Re: [SOLVED] seem to have an initramfs problem

#11 2026-07-19 21:20:24

Re: [SOLVED] seem to have an initramfs problem

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