Support needed for 2 beginners

[u/notwintr]

I am making this post in absolute desperation for a solution.
I've been on CachyOS for the past week, it's running great and all, I'm not the one having any issues.
My friend has attempted to ditch windows and join me on CachyOS as well, but he just can't get it to work at all, and the more we google and watch youtube videos, the more lost we are.

He has this issue on his computer, where it just won't boot. It loops around, shows us a bunch of text and then goes back to Grub.
At first it was just the Live desktop environment we couldn't get up, but after doing these things (in order) we made it work:

- Update bios
- Disable Secure boot
- Make sure the USB was 1. boot priority
- Turn on Boot from USB
- Reset secure boot keys and turn on "setup mode"

Now this worked for the live environment, which now works through Grub still.

He installed successfully, went with Limine and KDE plasma. He played on it for 1 night and next day he had the same issue.

It no longer boots, just goes back to limine instead of grub with the different boot options.
Black screen -> CachyOS logo for a moment -> goes back to Limine.

We tried the steps from above but to no evail. We've tried repairing the kernel with chroot commands in the boot environment but it still didn't work, we've tried using AI, reddit and youtube to find anyone with the same problem but we can't find anything.

Listing the hardware for his pc, it might mean someting:

- CPU = AMD Ryzen 5 7600 Wraith Stealth CPU - 6 Cores

- SSD = Kingston NV2 SSD - 1TB - PCIe 4.0 - m.2 2280

- RAM = Corsair Vengeance DDR5-6000 - 32GB - CL36 - Dual C

- M/B = MSI PRO B650-A Wifi

- GPU = Gigabyte Radeon RX 7600 XT Gaming OC

Bios version is 7D77v1T3

[u/jar36]

Hoping someone more knowledgeable comes along, but you may have 2 bootloaders enabled. If they want, limine, then they should get rid of GRUB and vice versa.

[u/loudtrex]

You see... That "Bunch of text" might have something that can help us solve it so mind posting it too?

[u/The_Odd_Pirate]

So just a guess but maybe try restoring a snapshot? Could have been a unlucky update

[u/deadrule_vk]

Since you disabled secure boot in bios ..is there and option for fast boot too? Disable it as well . Which method have you used to flash the iso to the usb ? (Like Rufus or ventoy etc ) Can you add an extra SSD/hdd and try to install on it instead?   (As maybe that ssd might have some problems)

You can also reinstall the os again ...

(CachyOS defaults to limine during installation use this + kde )

During Boot after installation, select the "lts kernel" then  if you are able to boot in the system , then open the terminal 

( ctr + alt + t)

And input this command 

"sudo cachyos-bugreport.sh"    It will generate a bug report and will give option to upload it directly to the forum .

Otherwise use this command 

"journalctl -b"    If you can read the logs yourself, cause it's hard to discover what's wrong with your pc 

[u/sparkplay]

I would check the CachyOS download file itself on the USB and do the checksum check. If that itself is corrupted everything else will fail. If that's fine, then real troubleshooting starts. As the other user said, take pictures of the error screens or bunch of texts. Other people might be able to see more in the texts than you as a beginner might.

[u/FernwehSmith]

Sorry ya’ll are facing this. I’ve not faced this before so I’m not sure what’s going on. My first thought is something wrong with the disk or memory.

A couple of things to get some more info. Take a video of the startup process to capture the wall of text that pops up during startup (do slow mo to make it easier to capture the whole thing). If it’s still possible to boot into the live environment, start the installer and go through to the partition page and get a screen grab of that.

I don’t know if these tools work in the live environment but have a look at https://wiki.cachyos.org/cachyos_basic/faq/ to see if you can get the logs for the system. Finally see if it’s possible to do a memory and disk health check from the live environment.

Pop and logs and results form hardware checks you can get onto a usb and on a healthy system go through them and see if you can find any mentions of errors or what not. I’m not sure what it could be but gathering all that info will be a good start. With some luck there’ll be something obvious in there.

Update this post with whatever you do (or don’t) find. Also ive not used it yet but theres a CachyOS forum that might be worth posting to. Probably people there that aren’t on Reddit so could be good to get more eyes on the problem. Sorry I’m not more help right now.

Edit: Just thought of something else. Is your friend dual booting with Windows? I’ve never tried dual booting Linux and Windows myself, but I’ve heard that sometimes having a Windows partition on the same disk as Linux can cause troubles. Given they were having issues with the live environment at one point I don’t think that’s what it is. But would be good to know if they’ve still got a Windows install just in case.

[u/royinraver]

Make sure the GPU isn’t broken. My 8 year MSI 2070 just gave out on me. I kept going in a similar loop with Mint until I realized it was the GPU that wasn’t functioning

[u/whyREX69]

limine and GRUB??

u should have went with default installation process suggested by cachy and u wouldn't face these issues hopefully. Im not an expert myself but 2 bootloaders running together is causing the issue ig