Strange Boot Problem

[Member stevix]

Well it’s strange to me anyway. I’ve put Antix 21 (64 bit) on a Ventoy USB stick, on it’s own USB stick and I’ve installed it on a little netbook. In all cases I’ve had no significant problems, they’ve all booted straight away and they’ve all connected to my wifi immediately (even on a machine with Broadcom B43). So I had the idea of installing to a portable hard drive, so that I had a complete portable system, with all my music and a few other bits. My music collection takes 60Gb of space on it’s own.

So that’s what I did, and it won’t boot. It gets as far as “loading initial ramdisk” then goes to black screen with flashing cursor in top left corner. Doesn’t matter how long I leave it, never goes beyond that. All of my efforts have been done from the same ISO file, so as 3 attempts have been fine I don’t see that there can be anything wrong with that.

The fact it’s only failed on portable HDD may suggest the drive is faulty, but I’ve tried it on two different drives with same results. Also one of the drives has previously had another distro installed on it, and that booted ok.

Any thoughts, ideas or suggestions greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[Moderator christophe]

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I ran into a similar problem while setting up a computer that I haven’t used in a long time. To spare you my boring story, suffice it to say that when I changed the kernel from the 5.10 series to 4.9, that cleared it up. Now it boots quickly, as expected.

So check out that line of inquiry. If that is your case, I recommend you keep both the latest from the 4.9 series & the 5.10 series (like antiX full ISO has). This way, if one will not work on whichever computer you use, then hopefully the other will. Maybe even add 4.19, just to have more choices.

HTH 🙂

• This reply was modified 1 year, 2 months ago by christophe.

confirmed antiX frugaler, since 2019

[Member robertklsz]

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Had this happen to me recently. Try adding the “nomodeset” the kernel parameters.

[Member stevix]

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I’ve now had the chance to try a few more experiments, and to me it’s only deepened the mystery. Tried some different kernels and at one point the portable HD booted, but only on one machine, bluntly refused on the other two. Also did a bit of a recap on other distros, Manjaro boots fine from the portable HD on all my machines, but Linux Mint won’t boot on any machine.

I think I’m going to abandon this idea, as I’ve already spent far more time than I intended on it. It’s not as though it’s stopping me from doing anything, after all I’ve still got Antix installed on one machine and I’ve got the live USB to plug into others. I suppose it’s just denying me a bit of convenience, which isn’t the end of the world.

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