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hello!
i like to install arch32 on an old macbook 1,1.
i managed to boot the archiso32 liveimage and installed the system including systemd bootloader.
now at reboot i see the bootoptions screen with my two kernels, linux and linux-lts, but i am not able to boot them.
i get a blackscreen with a cursor at the top left (not blinking). kernel parameter nomodeset does not change anything.
now i'm running out of ideas what could be tried. any thoughts? thanks in advance.
Last edited by mokman (2018-10-08 11:45:53)
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What bootloader are you using? Systemd is not a bootloader last time I checked; it's an init script replacement, which is a whole boot stage further on.
The first thing it should report as I recall is that it's loading your vmlinux, so if it's not doing that there's something pretty basic up with it. Have you tried booting an the liveimage iso; the bootmenu in that includes an option to boot your installed OS, which I think will bypass most bootloader config problems and test everything else.
IIRC on my 32 bit machine, I couldn't get grub-legacy to work for me, so I settled on using syslinux, which has been working okay for me ever since.
Edit: Ah okay, systemd-boot is a renaming of gummiboot, which I think was around when I was choosing a bootloader, but I couldn't use it as my 32-bit machine doesn't use UEFI; it's an older MBR and VBR setup.
Last edited by levi (2018-10-03 22:39:41)
Architecture: pentium4, Testing repos: Yes, Hardware: EeePC 901+2GB RAM+OS half on the SD card.
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thanks for the reply!
i do not see any bootmenu when booting from the liveimage. it was really tricky to get the liveimage to load in the first place.
i have to use a 32bit EFI bootloader on this old macbook, so systemdboot is the right choice i guess? or is there another EFI loader i can try?
is there any way to see what is happening after the bootentry screen? i still can chroot into the new installation.
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If you can get into a bootloader menu, most interfaces have an option to see what each option actually means. Try pressing Tab I think.
I don't have a lot of experience of UEFI bootloaders, since both my 32 and 64 bit rescue machines don't touch UEFI. But last time I looked, there seemed to be more UEFI capable bootloaders than ones that supported the old MBR layout. I've only used syslinux on my 32 bit machine and grub-legacy on my 64 bit machine. But the loader on the iso looks like syslinux to me, so if you can't use that I'd be tempted to scratch using syslinux. I usually try some variant of grub first, and only if I can get that working look around for alternatives.
Edit: if you can get into systemd-boot and get the menu, and the filesystem seems okay when you chroot into it, I think your initcpio might be out of whack. Try regenerating it using mkinitcpio from a chrooted environment.
Last edited by levi (2018-10-06 18:28:50)
Architecture: pentium4, Testing repos: Yes, Hardware: EeePC 901+2GB RAM+OS half on the SD card.
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i already did regenerated the initcpio, because i added the btrfs hook. speaking of btrfs, could it be that it can't find the root partition? i have it labeled ROOT and the entry in the /boot/loader/entries/arch.conf looks valid to me:
options root=LABEL=ROOT rootflags=subvol=@ rw
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Yes, that seems to fit with the description of such configs here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Gu … ng_loaders
Architecture: pentium4, Testing repos: Yes, Hardware: EeePC 901+2GB RAM+OS half on the SD card.
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i am running out of ideas. did a mkinitcpio just in case, also a full pacman -Syu and bootctl update, but the error is still there. triple checked everything, fstab, /boot/loader/entries, all seems good.
any other ideas? maybe chainloading grub from the systemd-boot? how would i set up this?
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There are several bootloaders to try, and thus far (touch wood) I've always found one or other that I can follow the instructions of that works for me. Have you tried them all yet?
Architecture: pentium4, Testing repos: Yes, Hardware: EeePC 901+2GB RAM+OS half on the SD card.
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problem solved! i installed grub-i368, which showed me an error message, it was indeed a problem with btrfs. i had to set the correct default subvolume, now its booting. but it seems this https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=238991 bug did bit me as well, so far i can only boot the lts kernel. thanks for your help levi!
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