Irregular Boot Issues (Haunted Mobo?)

Software & Operating Systems Linux
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My PC is incredibly inconsistent when booting. This has been going on since I built it ~1 year ago. It used to be that, on the rare occasions I did need to reboot, I could just reset once or twice and it would be fine. Things to have gotten worse in the past 2 or 3 months and the issue may have started affecting runtime operation as well. I’m fairly experienced with Linux but diagnosing hardware is entirely beyond my ken.

The boot failures are incredibly irregular. They happen no matter what device I’m booting from, although some devices have their own peculiarities. I’ll list them here so they’ll be easy to reference.

  • I get a flash of kernel messages on screen before the screen goes blank. During a normal boot the screen comes back after a second with systemd messages.
  • GRUB fails to find the initramfs
  • GRUB doesn’t start at all (very rarely happens)
  • Kernel Panic!
  • Systemd gets hung on a task, such as setting up networking
  • My Pop OS live USB boots but doesn’t load Gnome properly (no ‘Activities’ menu) and starts the GUI interface for setting up a new user
  • On one recent occasion, the BIOS failed to find my boot drive. Then, after a reboot, failed to find any devices at all. Updating the BIOS fixed this

I originally thought this might be a hard drive issue since fsck run from a live USB had a lot of stuff to fix, but I’ve had many of the same issues booting from USB. Recently, just to be extra sure that it wasn’t a SATA controller issue, I switched from a SATA drive to an NVMe drive, and a experienced the exact same issues, plus one: The NVMe drive would only boot in ro mode. I applied a fix from stack exchange (can’t find the page in my browser history) to a configuration file (can’t remember which) that has fixed that issue. (Hopefully the fix didn’t/won’t make anything worse seeing as I won’t be able to go back and fix it…)

I am currently using Pop OS 20.04, but I have had Ubuntu MATE 18.04 and Fedora 30 on this PC. They all booted poorly. It might be worth noting that the Pop OS installer had some troubles working properly as well. 19.04 consistently failed during installation (I tried about a dozen times) and 20.04 failed once or twice. (I honestly can’t tell you why I was so resolved in my decision to use Pop OS; normally I would give up after the first few failed installations)

I’m pretty certain there’s an issue with the mobo, but I have no clue how it’s failing. Maybe it’s a Ryzen 3rd gen incompatibility thing? Hopefully ya’ll can help point me in the right direction. I’m putting a record of how my last attempt at rebooting went below, along with some systemd and kernel logs. Let me know if you need any more information or clarification

My Hardware:

  • ASRock Fatal1ty X470 Gaming-ITX/ac
  • AMD Ryzen 3600X
  • Corsair Vengence LPX DDR4 3200 Mhz 16 GB
  • Samsung 860 EVO 250 GB SATA SSD (old root)
  • Samsung 970 EVO Plus 250 GB NVMe SSD (new root)
  • WD Blue 1TB HDD (/home)
  • AMD Radeon RX580 8G

Boot Records (text files are journalctl output):

/var/log/kern.log kern.log.txt (1.4 MB)

(Note: I say things happened ‘recently’ a few times. What I mean is within the past 4-6 weeks)