[gentoo-user] boot hangs forever at “Loading initial ramdisk...”

[John Blinka <john.blinka@gmail.com>]

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Hi, Gentooers,

New thread, next obstacle in booting new Asus mobo.

As the subject says, the boot hangs indefinitely.  Output to the screen is

  Booting a command list

Loading Linux 5.10.27-gentoo-x86_64 ...
Loading initial ramdisk ...

And there it stops forever.

The kernel is the latest stable gentoo-sources.  I normally do a custom
configuration, but in this instance built it with “genkernel all”, using
whatever config genkernel produces. I use grub (grub2), and installed the
kernel and initrd with “grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg”, as I
normally do.

Googling around shows that this problem tends to occur when grub can’t find
the initrd.

So  I looked at the grub boot script by pressing “e” just before the boot
starts to make sure that grub is looking in the right place for the kernel
and for the initrd.  I think it is, since deliberately misspelling either
file name with the grub editor causes error messages saying grub can’t find
what I told it to look for.  And those error messages do not occur with the
boot script that grub generated.

Normally, loading the initrd takes only a few seconds.

How does one debug this situation?

John

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