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Topic: Can only boot in on fallback initramfs (Read 661 times) previous topic - next topic
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Can only boot in on fallback initramfs

Hi all. On both my desktop and laptop for the last couple weeks I have been intermittently and seemingly at random experiencing a black screen with a single _ cursor without loading lightdm-gtk-greeter. I'm assuming this has to do with my recent installation of multiple kernels onto both of my machines (linux-zen and linux on desktop, linux and linux-lts on laptop).  Because I have a nvidia gpu on each machine, per advice I received here, I have installed nvidia-dkms on both.

I have looked over others who have documented similar experiences in other forums and noticed that they solve this issue by reconfiguring via mkinitcpio and updating grub.

I have been able to temporarily fix this by using mkinitcpio, specifically mkinitcpio -P followed by updating grub.

Nevertheless, usually after a long period of being left off, both my desktop and laptop repeat the behavior, and I am unable to get to the lightdm-gtk-greeter or really any other prompt (tty will not load with any of the Fn keys). The only way I can get back in is to hard reboot and then in grub, specify a backup initramfs.

Could someone please advise on how best to troubleshoot this?  I'm still relatively new (only 1.75 years in on Linux)  and at a bit of a loss on how to proceed.

Thanks in advance.

EDIT: On further inspection, at least on my laptop, I'm receiving an error at boot, that I then looked up from dmesg and got this:

[  +0.000405] intel-spi 0000:00:1f.5: unrecognized JEDEC id bytes: c2 75 18 c2 75 18

Any help or insight would be much appreciated.

Re: Can only boot in on fallback initramfs

Reply #1 –
This may be a kernel regression or a lightdm bug. You can try different kernels and another login manager (e.g. lxdm or sddm) to pin down the culprit.

Re: Can only boot in on fallback initramfs

Reply #2 –
Quote from: nous – on
This may be a kernel regression or a lightdm bug. You can try different kernels and another login manager (e.g. lxdm or sddm) to pin down the culprit.

Ok, I hadn't thought that perhaps it was simply lightdm and did a little digging into similar past situations with lightdm. I found in the lightdm.conf file that it had still defaulted the user session to xfce, but I recently removed everything xfce related (except for a couple tools) and had replaced it with i3. I commented out the xfce sections in the config file and rebooted and so far so good, but I'll have to give it a couple more days to test out.

As I mentioned before this has been happening intermittently for the past couple weeks. The likelihood, however, is that this may very well be simply a lightdm configuration issue, as I have had two kernels working on both machines for a little over a month, but only started using i3 (on both machines) and uninstalled xfce about 3 weeks ago, when my problems started... so yeah, that makes sense.

I'll come back and close this topic up in a few days if the problem doesn't persist. If it does, I'll come back and post what I've found (if anything).

My laptop may be a different issue, however, as my poking around I found issues in dmesg that weren't present on my desktop (like the unrecognized JEDEC error message above), and elogind doesn't seem to be starting up on boot on the laptop, but no problems on my desktop.

I've been thinking about replacing elogind with seatd anyways, but would rather understand how to fix my issue first before doing that as it helps me learn.

And thanks nous, you've helped me immensely on here and truly I can't express my gratitude enough.