Mageia forum

On a new computer with fresh MGA 9 when I issue the command "reboot" from a console or pressing off and on power button, the computer around 50% of the times will be freezing during the boot procedure. First I get the normal plymouth splash screen but after a few seconds a black terminal window on top of the splash sceen shows:

"Booting 'Mageia'
Loading Linux 6.6.74-desktop-1.mga9 ..."

This happens before the Plymouth login screen occurs.
When this occurs I can't do anything with the keyboard, mouse or access the pc over the network.
This window freezes endless until computer is restarted with the power button, or by completely switching off and on the main power switch.

Where would be the best place to search for some logs showing what went wrong? I have rsyslog installed and running.
I have been searching in the kernel, messages and syslog files but unfortunately i don't know how to understand these. I also have a "boot.log" file but I can't see anything in this file except the successeful bootups.

Maybe I can't expect to see why this happens in any log file?
Maybe some UEFI settings are not correct?
Any help would be much appreciated!
Per

To see log lines on screen during boot, remove "splash" and "quiet" from kernel boot parameters, see https://wiki.mageia.org/en/How_to_set_u ... otloader_2

pernel wrote:First I get the normal plymouth splash screen but after a few seconds a black terminal window on top of the splash sceen shows:

"Booting 'Mageia'
Loading Linux 6.6.74-desktop-1.mga9 ..."

This happens before the Plymouth login screen occurs.

Hi there, plymouth is the bootsplash, which shows after the bootloader has loaded initrd/kernel. So if the kernel is not loaded, then you don't see plymouth, but the graphical menu from the bootloader (called gfxboot).
For the logs, apart from what is shown on screen, if your box does not pivot from early boot to regular boot, the logs from early boot simply cannot be written to disk.

Only thing you can do as morgano mentioned show verbose boot messages, and note where the boot stops, and how long.
Another option would be to enable systemd debug logging, but that will not help if your box does not succeed to load the kernel.

On a related note, I'd rather not use reboot command nor use power button to power off your box.

Is this a newly built computer?

It is also possible you have a hardware problem. We need to see the boot messages.

Solved somehow but I don't no exactly why.

I had kernel desktop in the box but decided to try kernel server and used the MCC/Boot/Setup boot system to boot with kernel server. After this the box reboots reliably with with both kernel server or kernel desktop.
The error that prevented booting before was:

Kernel Panic - not syncing : VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block (0,0)

Maybe MCC Setup boot system somehow fixed the problem?

Now I have to decide whether to use kernel server or desktop for this box tha is a simple headless server for email, webserver, local samba file sharing, ssh etc. Been trying to understand the difference between kernel server and desktop. Any recommendations?

doctor5000:

On a related note, I'd rather not use reboot command nor use power button to power off your box.

what would be the most safe command to reboot the box remotely?

Per

If you only want to reboot remotely, then reboot command or systemctl reboot would be the way to go.
Although if you have a graphical session running you should do it via the means of the desktop environment.