I recently updated Manjaro i3 and was surprised that on the next reboot I was locked out. I was met by a black screen after the Grub menu and it just seemed to hang. I haven’t yet fully looked into the issue yet but I have found a fix so thought I share it in case anyone finds it useful.

The fix for me was to disable the modesetting kernel parameter. You can test this without the change being permanent and surviving a reboot.

Temporarily Disable modeset

At the Grub boot menu, press ‘e‘ and you should see the boot menu in text form. Find the line beginning with ‘linux’…

	savedefault
	load_video
	set gfxpayload=keep
	insmod gzio
	insmod part_gpt
	insmod cryptodisk
	insmod luks
	insmod gcry_rijndael
	insmod gcry_rijndael
	insmod gcry_sha256
	insmod ext2
	cryptomount -u 19dbefa630b1429bbc161c6be362a7df
	set root='cryptouuid/19dbefa630b1429bbc161c6be362a7df'
	if [ x$feature_platform_search_hint = xy ]; then
	  search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root --hint='cryptouuid/19dbefa630b1429bbc161c6be362a7df'  3f9744c1-b0a5-4946-a3ed-d13be3e905a3
	else
	  search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 3f9744c1-b0a5-4946-a3ed-d13be3e905a3
	fi
	linux	/boot/vmlinuz-4.14-x86_64 root=UUID=3f9744c1-b0a5-4946-a3ed-d13be3e905a3 rw quiet cryptdevice=UUID=19dbefa6-30b1-429b-bc16-1c6be362a7df:luks-19dbefa6-30b1-429b-bc16-1c6be362a7df root=/dev/mapper/luks-19dbefa6-30b1-429b-bc16-1c6be362a7df resume=/dev/mapper/luks-19dbefa6-30b1-429b-bc16-1c6be362a7df resume=UUID=9fd399f2-e687-4fed-8a04-fdfb85f52cff
	initrd	/boot/initramfs-4.14-x86_64-fallback.img

…and add ‘nouveau.modeset=0‘ as follows:

linux	/boot/vmlinuz-4.14-x86_64 root=UUID=3f9744c1-b0a5-4946-a3ed-d13be3e905a3 rw nouveau.modeset=0 quiet cryptdevice=UUID=19dbefa6-30b1-429b-bc16-1c6be362a7df:luks-19dbefa6-30b1-429b-bc16-1c6be362a7df root=/dev/mapper/luks-19dbefa6-30b1-429b-bc16-1c6be362a7df resume=/dev/mapper/luks-19dbefa6-30b1-429b-bc16-1c6be362a7df resume=UUID=9fd399f2-e687-4fed-8a04-fdfb85f52cff

To try booting with that new amendment, press the F10 button. In the above example, I disabled modeset for the Nouveau graphics driver. You may also want to try disabling modeset for Intel and/or AMD cards:

nouveau.modeset=0 i915.modeset=0 radeon.modeset=0

If this boots, you’ll need to make this change permanent – see below.

Permantly Disable modset

[andy@home-pc ~]$ sudo vim /etc/default/grub

Search for the ‘GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=””‘ line and add the below:

[andy@home-pc ~]$ grep -w GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX /etc/default/grub
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=”nouveau.modeset=0″

Save the file and then run the below command to regenerate your initramfs

[andy@home-pc ~]$ sudo update-grub