Arch linux; Initramfs unpacking failed: ZSTD-compressed data is truncated

Question

After upgrading my whole system yesterday

pacman -Syu

im facing the following error at boot

Initramfs unpacking failed: ZSTD-compressed data is truncated
/init: line 6: /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-udevd: Textfile busy

A password is required to access the volgroup0 volume:
Enter the passphrase for /dev/sb3:

whenever i try to put my passphrase it doesnt do anything and i have to manually shutdown my laptop

What i think could have caused this

a week or so ago i installed the zen kernel but it gave me some errors and i forgot to uninstall it.

Answer 1

One possibility is that your /boot partition is completely full, and when you last updated the kernel mkniticpio tried to generate new images, but didn't have enough space, and you were left with a bad (truncated) initramfs.

The solution would be to chroot into your filesystem with an Arch Linux LiveUSB, clean up /boot of any unneeded files, and then manually regenerate the initramfs.

Detailed step by step:

• First, boot an Arch Linux LiveUSB.
• Identify your / and /boot partitions with fdisk -l
• Mount the root partition: mount /dev/{rootpartition} /mnt/
• Mount /boot into your root partition: mount /dev/{bootpartition} /mnt/boot
• Chroot into your system: arch-chroot /mnt
• Remove existing initramfs images, and any unnecessary vmlinuz kernels from /boot/.
• Regenerate the initramfs with mkinitcpio -P

Pay attention to the output of the last command. If you're getting bsdtar errors this likely means /boot is still full. You can use df -h /boot to check disk usage.

If that's the case, you can either increase the size of /boot, or check how the initramfs is being generated in /etc/mkinitcpio.conf, and remove any modules you don't need from your configuration. In particular, if you're on NVIDIA, you may wish to remove the modules listed in this section if you're not facing display issues.