I’ve been running Manjaro for more than a year now, all of the sudden when I boot into it I get stuck on Dell logo and all I can do is restart. Sometimes I can successfully boot after restart, but lately it takes me 5 or more tries to boot successfully. I’ve seen some solutions for this on the web, but they are mostly some steps to try, it seems that it has to do with video driver, but I wanted to be sure of the steps since this is my work machine.
Edit: I am also running Windows 10 on this machine and I can boot into it successfully every time.
The randomness of boots succeeding and not succeeding sounds more like a problem with low entropy to me. If you have the system up and running now, then I would advise you to install haveged. It’s a random number generator that will increase the entropy your CPU generates at boot time.
Well, I can’t comment on that because I don’t do Windows. But I suspect that Windows doesn’t rely on the same mechanism for generating entropy. Maybe it doesn’t generate any entropy at boot time, or maybe it has its own random number generator.
Either way, have you tried it now, and does it work?
Question, have you installed anything lately that after this problem started. Also have you check your logs in /var/log to see if there is something that may be causing the delay in booting?
When it comes to windows, until you install the proprietary drivers, it uses a generic video driver. Also windows uses virt drivers until you put the proprietary ones on the system which is why windows works, it really never touches bare metal until all manufacturer drivers are installed.
This is Xorg.0.log in /var/log, the only readable one. The other one is Calamares.log, not sure if it’s relevant, sorry I can’t post links for some reason - pastebin com/raw/9cY18Ztm
after removing quiet from grub I saw that there was no error reported: all steps were passing.
The last step before the booting stopped were either Started TLP system startup/shutdown
or Started CUPS scheduler
Thanks to this reddit post I found out that once it’s stuck there if I press ctrl-F2 and then ctrl-F1 I can get to the manjaro login screen.
I then tried to upgrade the kernel from version 5.7 to 5.8 but that didn’t solve the issue. I wasn’t able to downgrade to 5.4 (I can’t find out how to switch kernel: in grub I don’t see the different versions listed) so I can’t say about it.