Stuck at "Loading initial ramdisk ..." when booting from HDD only

English Install/Boot/Login
1

This is an Asus X102BA system which I recently installed but discovered it only boots from an USB stick. I used a 32-bit offline media to install TW.

It looks like this machine can boot from an USB stick in either legacy (TW offline media) or UEFI mode (rEFInd). From disk it can boot in UEFI mode (previous Manjaro installation, rEFInd installed to disk). I’m not sure whether it can boot in legacy mode from disk whether MBR or GPT.

After installing and noticing the issue, I did two things in attempt to get things working:

  1. Remove the protective MBR flag from HDD – it was preventing the system from seeing the EFI entries.
  2. Install grub2-x86_84-efi and then grub2-install --target x86_64-efi /dev/sda (first I used i386-efi), then grub2-mkconfig – I assume something didn’t go quite right in this step

At this point booting from HDD, I get to GRUB menu but then TW gets stuck as the title says. I can select and boot Manjaro to desktop, it boots in UEFI mode.

Booting from USB:


$ ls -l /sys/firmware/
total 0
drwxr-xr-x  5 root root 0 mai 18 18:49 acpi
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 0 mai 18 18:49 devicetree
drwxr-xr-x  3 root root 0 mai 18 18:47 dmi
drwxr-xr-x 22 root root 0 mai 18 18:49 memmap

$ ls -lh /boot/efi/EFI/*
/boot/efi/EFI/boot:
total 124K
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 121K abr  5  2018 bootx64.efi

/boot/efi/EFI/Manjaro:
total 124K
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 121K abr  5  2018 grubx64.efi

/boot/efi/EFI/opensuse:
total 312K
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 312K mai 14 00:10 grubx64.efi

/boot/efi/EFI/refind:
total 312K
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  144 mai 13 23:32 BOOT.CSV
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4,0K mai 13 23:25 drivers_x64
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 8,0K mai 13 23:32 icons
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4,0K mai 13 23:25 icons-old
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  34K mai 13 23:32 refind.conf
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 249K mai 13 23:25 refind_x64.efi
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4,0K mai 13 23:32 vars

$ sudo parted -l
Model: ATA TOSHIBA MQ01ABF0 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 320GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags: 

Number  Start   End     Size    File system     Name  Flags
 1      1049kB  538MB   537MB   fat32                 boot, legacy_boot, esp
 2      538MB   2149MB  1611MB  linux-swap(v1)        swap
 3      2149MB  2685MB  537MB   ext2
 4      2685MB  110GB   107GB   ext4
 5      110GB   110GB   8389kB                        bios_grub
 6      110GB   314GB   204GB   btrfs
 7      314GB   316GB   2148MB  linux-swap(v1)        swap


Model: SanDisk Ultra USB 3.0 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdb: 30,8GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
Disk Flags: 

Number  Start   End     Size    Type     File system  Flags
 1      1765kB  4593MB  4591MB  primary               boot, hidden, type=17

sudo fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 298,09 GiB, 320072933376 bytes, 625142448 sectors
Disk model: TOSHIBA MQ01ABF0
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: A068EDFC-AF0F-438A-9BFF-C8EA96A962AD

Device         Start       End   Sectors   Size Type
/dev/sda1       2048   1050623   1048576   512M EFI System
/dev/sda2    1050624   4196351   3145728   1,5G Linux swap
/dev/sda3    4196352   5244927   1048576   512M Linux filesystem
/dev/sda4    5244928 214960127 209715200   100G Linux filesystem
/dev/sda5  214960128 214976511     16384     8M BIOS boot
/dev/sda6  214976512 612558847 397582336 189,6G Linux filesystem
/dev/sda7  612558848 616753839   4194992     2G Linux swap


Disk /dev/sdb: 28,64 GiB, 30752636928 bytes, 60063744 sectors
Disk model: Ultra USB 3.0   
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x705341b1

Device     Boot Start     End Sectors  Size Id Type
/dev/sdb1  *     3448 8970239 8966792  4,3G 17 Hidden HPFS/NTFS

How can I get TW to boot normally from HDD?

2

More research, I found some similar issues

In the last link, it provided a solution which looked promising, but all I got was a black screen after performing the steps (reinstall grub chrooting from an EFI-booted system) and rebooting.

Looks like I need to create an EFI-only thumb drive and reinstall from scratch.

3

I didn’t look at those links, but I did write this here less than 24 hours ago. Is it the same instruction set you already tried?

Disabling CSM in BIOS should be all you need to prevent anything from booting other than in UEFI mode. That should ensure your existing openSUSE media would be all you need to install again.

4

Yes, the same routine. Although efivars weren’t loaded, modprobe efivars failing due to lack of modules, so I used --no-nvram in grub2-install.

There’s an option Legacy USB Support, disabling it makes the TW 32-bit media inaccessible. Plugging a rEFInd media shows as both UEFI and non-UEFI options so it must be an issue with TW media or this machine BIOS/UEFI implementation.

5

You installed a 32-bit openSUSE Tumbleweed system but have only 64-bit UEFI bootloaders.

Regards

susejunky

6

I’ve read that UEFI and CPU don’t need to match bitwise. Manjaro is also a 32-bit installation and it boots fine. I tried previously “grub2-install --target=i386-efi” to no avail.

7

I should have paid more attention to this thread.

It’s good to know that grub from Arch/Manjaro still works. Maybe I should try using that.

I have tw32 installed in a VM and booting with UEFI. This used to work well until last summer. Then some changes to grub2 left it unable to boot that way. I complained about that in bug 1177009.

It seems that grub2-*-efi now forces the grub “linux” command to actually use the “linuxefi” command. And that breaks loading tw32.

At present, I am using “grub2-x86_64-efi-2.04-16.1.noarch.rpm” from last August (the last version before that change was made). But I’m pretty sure that “grub2-x86_64-efi-2.04-lp152.7.12.1.noarch.rpm” from Leap 15.2 will also work. Note that this is not the latest version on Leap 15.2, but should still be in the repos.

I actually have the latest grub2-x86_64-efi installed at the system level for that tw32 system. But I keep a copy of “/usr/share/grub2/x86_64-efi” from the earlier version. I actually have that in “/usr/local/share/grub2/x86_64-efi”. And then if I need to setup booting again, I use the “–directory” option to select that older directory when running “grub2-install”.

My suggestion: Install “grub2-x86_64-efi-2.04-lp152.7.12.1.noarch.rpm” from Leap 15.2, and then save a copy of the directory “/usr/share/grub2/x86_64-efi” elsewhere for future use.

Yes, I actually have “grub2-i386-pc” installed for MBR booting, but that doesn’t do anything on a system that uses UEFI. But it does keep Tumbleweed happy. When an update requires reinstalling booting, it reinstalls the MBR booting (which still doesn’t do anything). From time to time I check whether the latest grub2-x86_64-efi will boot the system, but that always fails and I have to revert to the older grub2 version for that.

8

And here’s it running, although with missing capabilities:


$ dmesg | grep -iw efi
    0.000000] efi: EFI v2.31 by American Megatrends
    0.000000] efi: ACPI=0x5c3f0000 ACPI 2.0=0x5c3f0000 SMBIOS=0xf04c0 
    0.000000] efi: No EFI runtime due to 32/64-bit mismatch with kernel
    0.057160] efi: Setup done, disabling due to 32/64-bit mismatch
    7.474768] fb0: EFI VGA frame buffer device
   10.745815] fb0: switching to radeondrmfb from EFI VGA

I tried i386-efi before but it seems unsupported, or possibly buggy? The 32-bit loader seems invisible jumping to BIOS setup instead while the 64-bit loader at least printed something to screen.

At least it used to, at the time this system was first installed 3 years ago. Unfortunately the OS prober didn’t work which could help with this case.

That was the trick it seems, as it can be seen from the output above. I almost messed up, because it didn’t work immediately. I guess I forgotten to refer to the 64-bit grub version, so when I updated to point to grubx64.efi then it works. Thanks Mr Rickert!

Before fixing I attempted to boot with a Leap 15.2 thumb drive. It boots in UEFI mode and could be used to be installed this way on this system. But booting linux system gives gives “Sorry, cannot boot system” or something. TW 32-bit media is less capable as it can only boot in legacy mode.

Thanks all!

9

Why install 32 bit os on 64bit hardware???

10

This is a machine with 1,4GB of RAM. I tested out Xfce/Gnome/KDE in VMs, and in all of them the 32-bit version used ~200MB less RAM once booted up. So I decided for Xfce 32-bits and I set up zRAM. The intended usage is for LibreOffice, Google Meet, webmail mostly. I may consider switching to the 64-bit overall, it might be able to afford the extra RAM usage. I hope I can perform a benchmark to understand if it runs smoother under 64-bit. I don’t miss any software only compiled for 64-bit. Thoughts?

11

Complementing my previous answer.

Run a benchmark with stress-ng:

  • Run installed 32-bits system against a live 64-bits rescue thumb-drive;
  • Possibly tainted since I made the installed system boot with mitigations=off. The question is whether to redo the bench;
  • Most operations compared unexpectably the same on both systems, especially CPU instructions and bogo ops;
  • CPU cycles are far greater in a given timespan for 64-bits, I suppose the pipeline runs deeper.

Attempted to benchmark 64-bits with jitsi meet on firefox:

  • TW 32-bits: after a while firefox becomes unresponsive;
  • TW 64-bits: firefox struggles even to load, eventually it loads but it doesn’t makes for a good impression;
  • Manjaro (previous installation): doesn’t break but couldn’t change camera resolution.

Even though the benchmark is far from comparable, I don’t think a 64-bits OS would is worth a try for this use case.

12

Yep rather thin on memory.

Which desktop?? Would not recommend KDE or Gnome

13

If you’re going to recommend against KDE, then you should recommend against XFCE as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrvJOXypAbk

14

Xfce desktop.

15

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-weight_Linux_distribution

If this laptop has 4 GiB RAM, then it is usable, but with 2 GiB it costs near to nothing.
Memory is unupgradable in this laptop.
Use SSD - big and fast swap is needed.

You may try to lower video RAM to 8-16 MiB and turn off composer (desktop effects).