Debian KVM – Fix Debian 8 KVM Guest Stuck at Loading Initial Ramdisk

bootdebiankvmramdisk

I have updated my KVM management script for Ubuntu 14.04 KVM hosts to support debian 8 guests. After a manual installation (preseed script does not work yet), I am stuck with the the following message on bootup:

enter image description here

During the installation, I:

  • Selected only ssh server and base system utilities.
  • Set the grub bootloader to install to the only listed option.
  • Used the guided partitioning mode for everything on one partition.
  • Used the local UK mirror.

Is there some step I need to be careful to make or can Debian 8 not yet be installed as a KVM guest?

Update

After giving up and deciding to just upgrade a debian 7 VM to debian 8 by updating all of the lines in /etc/apt/sources.list to jessie instead of wheezy, I found that I eventually got the same behaviour.

However this instance had a static IP and I found that I could still SSH into the server on that IP, so it looks like this is some sort of graphics issue where the server does manage to boot up, we just can't see the login text. How can I resolve this?

Update

This time, on the debian installation created by upgrading debian 7, I can click advanced from the grub menu and select the option with (sysvinit) which works for now. I am hoping this can lead to an explanation of what is going wrong with the normal version that gets booted?

enter image description here

Best Answer

Thanks to the link @Someone posted in the comments to the question, I was able to pull this content which fixed the issue for me:

  1. on the boot screen (below) press the "e" key to edit the configuration. enter image description here

  2. You will be shown a screen like follows. enter image description here

  3. Scroll down using the keyboard down arrow. You want the line that says linux enter image description here

  4. Add the text console=ttyS0 after the word quiet and then press cntrl + x to proceed enter image description here

  5. Now as root, or using sudo, run the command systemctl enable getty@ttyS0 in order to never have to go through all those steps again.

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