Can't get past "Loading initial ramdisk" on reboot

English Install/Boot/Login
1

I have just installed OpenSUSE 13.2 on a six year-old computer. After booting into the new system, I did a “zypper up” to bring everything up to date, and installed more software. Everything was working well. I then attempted to reboot, but now I cannot get past

Loading Linux 3.16.7-21-desktop ...
Loading initial ramdisk ...

I also tried the original 3.16.6-2-desktop that was distributed, but it gives the same result. Even trying the “recovery mode” options in the Grub menu does not work. I also tried a couple of the bootable snapshots, without success.

2

It’s a bit hard to guess the problem without more information.

One possibility is that your disk is full, and recreating the “initrd” did not complete because of that. You might boot from the install media in rescue mode and check.

3

I have brought it up in rescue mode using the DVD as you suggested. I used “fdisk -l” to find the names of the partitions: /dev/sda1 (swap), /dev/sda2 (boot), and /dev/sda3 (home). I mounted these with commands like

mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/boot
mount /dev/sda3 /mnt/home

The boot partition is 71% full, and home is 3% full.

There are two initrd files in the boot partition:
/mnt/boot/boot/initrd-3.16.6-2-desktop (9571844 bytes)
/mnt/boot/boot/initrd-3.16.7-21-desktop (9579224 bytes)

There are also 33 initrd files in /mnt/boot/.snapshot/#/snapshot/boot where # is a number from 1 to 33. These seem to be related to the two initrd files above and range in size from 9570000 to 1238800 bytes.

I am not sure what to do how.

4

You seem to have two kernels installed, the original kernel-desktop-3.16.6-2, and kernel-desktop- 3.16.7-21 from the failed update.
From Grub you should be able to use the “advanced” feature to select the earlier kernel, and boot from that.

5

Try to add dis_ucode_ldr to your boot options. You might be affected by https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=913996 .
To do that, press ‘e’ in the boot menu and append that option to the line starting with “linux”, then press ‘F10’ to boot.

If that helps, add it permanently in YaST->System->Boot Loader, or uninstall the packages ucode-amd and ucode-intel.

See also: https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/505523-Boot-stops-at-quot-Loading-initial-ramdisk-quot?p=2698233#post2698233

6

Adding dis_ucode_ldr to the boot options fixed the problem. Thanks for that. I really appreciate your help.