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The latest kernel update on Mageia 5 is causing a problem on my HP laptop, which prevents the system from booting up. Updating to kernel version 4.4.105-1 appears to work, but when I reboot my machine it goes to a black screen after the "initial ramdisk" message (not sure about the exact wording because the message doesn't remain on the screen for long enough) and stays there. I have repeated the boot attempt several times, tried recovery mode, and left the machine in this state for half an hour. It makes no difference: The system is stuck on a black screen, every time.

I should mention that I use VirtualBox, so the issue may be with configuring the kernel for VirtualBox during this first boot, rather than the kernel itself. I just don't know.

For the moment, I was able to work around the issue by booting into the old kernel (4.4.92-1). Everything works fine. From here, I have also tried to uninstall and reinstall the new kernel, but the result is still the same black screen on the first boot. Crtl-Alt-F2 doesn't produce a login prompt, so the problem isn't just with the graphical interface.

Sooner or later, I'll have to upgrade to Mageia 6, but I have a big project coming up and had too many problems on my first try with Mageia 6 to trust it fully. So if there's a reasonably easy way to fix this, that would be great.

Gelsenbury wrote:I should mention that I use VirtualBox, so the issue may be with configuring the kernel for VirtualBox during this first boot, rather than the kernel itself. I just don't know.

Is this problem with the virtualbox host or with a guest?

This is the host machine. It runs Mageia 5. I use Virtual Box to test Mageia 6 and run Windows if I ever need it for work.

Edit: I just had to take the laptop for a repair because of an unrelated hardware problem. When I get it back, I'll see what else I can try.