Manjaro won't boot, screen alternates blank/off, TTY unusable (keeps jumping off to the failed graphical TTY7)

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1

After the Manjaro splash screen, I could, if I pressed F1, see the boot column, no error displayed at all. However, the system would constantly try to put me back on the graphical TTY, and there, the screen would alternate being blank and off every second or two.

Pressing the power button once makes Manjaro shut down - meaning it’s still in the boot process, I have it configured so that pressing the power button doesn’t do anything.

After booting on my install drive, I chrooted in and ran pacman -Syyu, then tried opening Manjaro, but nothing changed. I went back to the live environment, and used journalctl -k -b -1 to get the log. I can’t post links yet, but I didn’t see anything that seemed out of the ordinary. Not gonna post the whole thing here, it’s 1383 lines long. The pastebin URL code is wW3wvgLj

Last time I shut the PC down, I don’t remember exaclty how I did it, but chances are I ordered it to suspend to disk (hibernate), and after it failed for whatever reason, I forced it to shut down. This had already happened a few times already and the PC would just turn back on without restoring the session - annoying but not a problem.

System info:

OS: Manjaro Linux x86_64
Host: ASUS TUF Gaming A15 FA507XI_TUF507XI 1.0
Kernel: 6.12.4-1-MANJARO (also installed 613 and 614)
DE: Xfce
CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS w/ Radeon 780M Graphics (16) @ 5.263GHz
GPU: AMD ATI 66:00.0 Phoenix1
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Max-Q / Mobile
Memory: 2845MiB / 31307MiB

For the dual gpu I use the video-hybrid-amd-nvidia-prime driver.

Little more info :

My previous live USB was outdated (on kernel 69), but I could still chroot into my installation, so… Still, I got myself a new live.

I also attempted (following the Reddit commenter’s recommendations) to fix the initramfs (with mkinitcpio -P), and even tried installing packages for the “possibly missing firmware for module […]”, to no avail.

I can just reinstall everything, but I don’t use my computer often anymore, so reinstalling everything takes too long. Is there a way I can reinstall my system, keeping all my stuff, including configs and installed apps ?

2

Can you try another LTS kernel like 6.6.x ?

3

Same thing. Although for whatever reason the screen doesn’t go completely off anymore, it just alternates between completely blank and blank with the cursor at the top left.

I just noticed the system fails to get the swap partition on boot. I guess me trying to swapoff, reformat the swap partition, and swap back on hoping it was a failed hibernation state; caused that timeout. Annoying but not the problem.

4

If you reformatted the swap partition, it now has got a different UUID.
Check /etc/fstab vs lsblk -f whether they match - if not, adapt /etc/fstab
or comment out that line until you can fix it, so it won’t interfere anymore for the time being.

CTRL+ALT+F4 (or any other Fx between 1 and 6) doesn’t give you a stable prompt on that TTY?
You can temporarily disable the display manager and re-enable it later when the issue is fixed:
systemctl disable lightdm.service

you can start it at any time
systemctl start lightdm.service

But you can - just not active links.
use " or </> in the top row of the edit window to format them

5

Getting somewhere. disabling lightdm does allow me to reach TTY, starting it causes the issue immediately.

Though I’m confused, since I already tried reinstalling it. Gonna look into resetting it later.

6

With lightdm switched off - try:

startxfce4

7

Generally, to perform a sync/update you should use;

sudo pacman -Syu

unless you are specifically directed to do otherwise; and/or if you understand the ramifications of using any other variant.

(Naturally, without sudo in a chroot environment);

Regards.

8

Can you remove quiet from the kernel command line ?
To see where the boot process stops.

9

Yes, you can do that; at least, I think so; I’ve always preferred to see that text, myself.