Debian 'Loading ramdisk' forever

How I fixed the issue

Originally posted .

While reinstalling upcoming Debian 10 (buster) I had issues when booting. My setup is roughly

When first booting laptop after reinstall I encountered some issues with initramfs. Ie. after entering cryptsetup / LUKS password & selecting item from GRUB menu, system froze while displaying “Loading ramdisk”.

After lots of debugging I compared two initrd images (one from old setup, one from new setup) with lsinitramfs and noticed that new one didn’t have Plymouth installed. This in turn caused some i915 modules to be missing from new image. And this caused the issue, didn’t debug further.

Id est, fix was just running

apt-get install plymouth plymouth-themes
plymouth-set-theme spinfinity # my favourite
update-initramfs -u

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