I’m not exactly sure how it happened, but my computer freezes at (before?) boot atfer the latest system upgrade. I use btrfs with full disk encryption and the freeze happens just after I press the power button, it doesn’t even ask for the encryption password. No interaction is possible at all, no grub, and I don’t even have the option to get into UEFI. I’m guessing this is either a luks or a boot image issue (the boot partition is unencrypted by default if I remember correctly).
Luckily the UEFI was set to prioritize booting from usb, so I can still use the live usb fedora installer. I used arch linux for a while, and its usb installer had a special chroot script for exactly this sort of situation. It allowed me to chroot into an unbootable system and attempt to fix it. Does fedora have a way for accomplishing the same thing? How should I attempt to regenerate the boot image?
Situation seems corrupted EFI on flash memory during update corresponding to modern device … only way out is service by OEM needing specif tools. Message on screen indicates don’t shutdown, plug in … nothing to do about OS, encryption, just dismantle and flash EFI.
I ended up reinstalling fedora and now my system boots, so it was not a motherboard EFI issue. I still don’t know what the problem was, only that it cost me most of my sunday.
I managed to figure out how to chroot into my system from the live usb and regenerated the boot images, but that didn’t help.
Why yes, I do indeed have an nvidia gpu so it might have been something related. Although I didn’t have an opportunity to interact with grub and switch to a different kernel like the person who started the other thread.
On the bright side, now I had the opportunity to stare at the text that normally flashes up very briefly after I press the power button, and it informed me that my RAMs were in non-matching slots for the past 6 years.
My first message adresses bricked device … seems not the case but before looking at anything concerning software, first address hardware issues. Non matching RAM boot log message always means something, not trivial. A lot of fluff and puff about Nvidia, version 6 kernel but encryption leads to blocking device for non authorized user. First cleanup hardware issue, next software as memory corruption leads to encryption corruption …
RAM in non-matching slots is usually quite simple to fix.
First read the manual on the motherboard, then relocate the RAM sticks into the appropriate slots as indicated. It obviously did not prevent using the board and RAM, but relocating the RAM to matching slots may improve overall performance.
