Hello all. I want to install Manjaro on an external USB drive I just bought for this specific purpose. However, as soon as I boot the live USB and reach the Gnome desktop, with the Manjaro Hello window, the whole PC freezes (well, I can’t tell 100%, but for sure any input device is frozen) and all I can do is reboot. I tried following some hints from the “[HowTo] Resolve an unbootable Manjaro (black screen, login failed, cant boot, etc)” guide (sorry I can’t post the link, first message in the new forum) and:
nomodeset and the %driver%.modeset=0 seems to do nothing
acpi=off completes the boot sequence but Gnome doesn’t start, just a blinking cursor on the top left
nolapic only gives one line about IRQ 13 (sorry I can’t recall it right now) and then freeze
Booting runlevel 3 seems to be fine: I could login, ran a few commands to test, but definitely not frozen. As soon as I launch startx, you guessed it, freeze.
A brief rundown of the specs: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X, Nvidia RTX 3080Ti, MSI B550 motherboard.
So… given the really short time I have when starting Gnome I don’t know how to provide more data to troubleshoot my issue. Seems to be something ACPI related but don’t know where to look… If anyone could throw me some tip, it would be greatly appreciated.
Until an expert comes along, some things to try:
Does the same happen with the KDE or XFCE iso?
Does the minimal image with kernel 5.10 display the same behavior or of you used that one, does the image with 5.13 work for you?
So, the latest XFCE iso seems to be ok, since I managed to start the installer and navigate a couple of windows without any issue. Gnome Minimal LTS, on the other hand, didn’t even boot in the Desktop, freezing after the init scripts.
To easily share the data the post below has some pointers since there is no gui.
I’m not sure I can help I’ll you solve the issue but the info above should give some clues as to what is happening.
Edit: I’ve writen the latest gnome iso (manjaro-gnome-21.1.6-211017-linux513.iso) to a fresh drive and booted with open & closed drivers and can’t recreate this problem, my hardware is lower end tho, using a GTX 950 & a Ryzen 5.
An option might be to enable sshd in the live environment, log in remotely, tail the journal with journalctl --follow and startx on the machine and see if that works? and/or the /var/log/Xorg.0.log
The live iso username is manjaro with the same password.
So, I followed your suggestion. I don’t have any Xorg log file at all, but I discovered a nice entry in the journalctl. As soon as I get the freeze (and this time, I don’t know why but I managed to go through a few steps of the installer as well), I read:
Dec 08 08:59:37 manjaro-gnome kernel: xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: WARNING: Host System Error
Dec 08 08:59:37 manjaro-gnome kernel: xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: AMD-Vi: Event logged [IO_PAGE_FAULT domain=0x0010 address=0xff640000 flags=0x0050]
Dec 08 08:59:37 manjaro-gnome kernel: xhci_hcd 0000:04:00.0: Host halt failed, -110
So I guess I have something to work with at least! Will report back when I found a solution
And we have a winner! It seems the culprit is a PCI Express USB 3.0 card to which both mouse and keyboard were connected. switching those to regular USB ports showed that the system wasn’t actually frozen, only USB inputs were (something I actually suspected – remember when I told that I wasn’t 100% sure? – but had no proof of that).
Now I have to understand the cause of the error, but at least I have my Manjaro up and running.
EDIT: it seems I also fixed the error with the USB port by adding iommu=pt in GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX in /etc/default/grub and launching sudo update-grub.
