I've been trying to get a variety of Linux distributions to work on my desktop, but I can't for the life of me figure out what's wrong. Every time I install a distro it boots and I'm left with a black screen and a flashing white cursor. I've made sure that secure boot is disabled, as well as, changing over to UEFI only from legacy. My system specs are listed below at the pcpartpicker link, any help will be greatly appreciated.
PC Specs: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/Ydr4hq
When are you encountering the issue? Does the install media boot? Is this when you're rebooting after a successful installation? Is your boot drive selected as first boot priority in your BIOS? And finally, do you have any other OSes installed?
After a successful install upon reboot is when the issue occurs. Also yes my boot drive is set as first priority and no other operating systems are installed.
It sounds like GRUB either isn't being detected, or it has issues with your BIOS config. Does it work if you have legacy boot only enabled rather than UEFI?
I've tried both legacy and UEFI boot modes and when in legacy the cursor doesn't even blink it just sits there. Also for some strange reason, my bios shows Antergos GRUB as a boot device. Note Antergos is currently installed.
Antergos GRUB as the boot device sounds about right. Try setting to legacy, boot into a gParted live disk to erase the disk, then reinstall Antergos. See if that gives any luck
I don't know if it's a GRUB problem though I thought the same thing initially. I also tried installing Antergos with systemd boot which had the same issue.
What video card (nvm, rx480) and is your UEFI up to date?
Couple things to try involve adding a couple flags to the grub boot commands. Nomodeset and acpi=off. After post hold shift to get into grub. Look online for the line to edit. I'm on mobile ATM.
Upon reboot when? Does it get to grub?
Also.make sure your bios is up to date, the latest release is v2.0 at the end of last month.
ive had this exact thing happens after installing and i think every time it was as simple as the installation media (USB drive) still being plugged into a USB port...im unsure why because the first boot device was still the hard drive I was trying to get into and NOT a USB drive BUT ive had it happen several times just by leaving the drive plugged in...so after install but before first boot unplug the USB drive if you dont already...sorry if this answer is too simple, but i know that ive done it many many times myself and gotten a blinking cursor (usually blinking too quickly) or something similar to that
Are you manually partitioning the drive?
If BIOS, did you remember to set the boot flag and select the correct disk for the boot loader?
If UEFI, did you configure the drive as GPT? Create a UEFI partition formatted fat32?
Sorry, all that it has taken me so long to reply. After messing with my system for a couple hours of tinkering I got Antergos to work. I have no idea why or how, but a couple of bouts with custom partitioning fixed the issue. I have no idea why my previous attempts at both auto and manual partitioning failed before.
Edit: My final conclusion is black magic voodoo.
Its your 480. For some arbitrary reason linux doesn't really like the 480 yet. When you boot your liveCD turn on nomodeset and you'll be fine.
I recommend using the Radeon drivers, not amdgpu.
Interesting it seemed that GRUB had been unable to detect the filesystem (aka root) while my 480 seems to be functioning normally.
Thats just grub.
Currious question;
Did you try Arch based distributions only?
No, I also tried Fedora with the same result it was quite strange.
Sunspots, most likely.
They are the bane of my existence!