Omarchy will not move past initial splash screen or archiso login messages on HP Omen | Omacom | Page 1

wintry oxide Oct 6, 2025, 7:08 PM

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Installation method: ISO v3.0.2
Install Location: [PC | W11] HP Omen Transcend 16
CPU: Intel i7-14700HX
GPU(s): Intel UHD & Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop

Preinstall steps completed:

Disabled Secure Boot
Disabled TPM
Disabled Device Encryption (prevents having to enter Bitlocker recovery key on startup every time while TPM is disabled)
Disabled Fast Startup aka Fast Boot
Selected GPU in BIOS is the NVIDIA card (this is machine default)

I am trying to completely wipe windows on my laptop and replace it with Omarchy. I have previously installed Omarchy via ISO v3.0.1 on my HP Z440 workstation and it was a breeze. No issues other than disabling secure boot for that machine.

For my laptop, I have tried almost every ISO boot method I could find in previous posts. This includes these approaches:

Simple flash with balenaEtcher
Using Rufus (GPT partition scheme - tried with both normal and DD options)
Using Ventoy (grub boot - tried to add "nomodeset" as this seemed to help others when it came to installing Omarchy on windows systems with an Nvidia card, not sure if I did it right tbh)

I have been switching attempts and cleaning off the USB drive each time using a combo of dd and windows diskpart.

No matter what I do, I can never even make it to the Omarchy configuration screen. I am either stuck at the "Omarchy" splash screen with no entry options or my laptop enters a command line display with the attached logs and never moves on (two separate cmdline hang issues, the one with Archiso login is from the Rufus non-DD; when I tried DD, it was simply a blank cli screen with a blinking underscore cursor in the top left corner).
Can someone please help? I really would like to use this on my machine and some of my freelance teams are moving to require this for our stack

wintry oxide Oct 6, 2025, 7:38 PM

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UPDATE:
I tried again with balenaEtcher and simply waited instead of being impatient with the splash screen. The installer went again to the "archiso login" display and redid that once or twice, then the install failed(I think?) with the attached logs.
I could not gather more info as the system would not respond to any input from my keyboard.

You can see that some of the stack trace towards the top was blanked out for some reason, as if there was some form of graphic or other text in front of it that disappeared. There are also some lines lower on the page where you can tell that there was other text there that was cut off or pasted over. I'm really not sure what to do at this point

shell mural Oct 6, 2025, 8:33 PM

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wintry oxide Installation method: ISO v3.0.2 Install Location: [PC | W11] HP Omen Transcend 1...

Manual install

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install base arch then omarchy on top of it

wintry oxide Oct 6, 2025, 8:45 PM

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shell mural Manual install

is that like install arch via ISO and then Omarchy ISO on top of that? or arch ISO -> install omarchy via package management

shell mural Oct 6, 2025, 8:46 PM

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wintry oxide is that like install arch via ISO and then Omarchy ISO on top of that? or arch I...

install arch via iso then omarchy using their install script

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It's the curl command in their manual installation section

wintry oxide Oct 6, 2025, 8:48 PM

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I know I read somewhere that the errors I'm getting could be from not having arch linux on my system but if that was a requirement what is even the point of the .iso for omarchy? @shell mural

shell mural Oct 6, 2025, 8:48 PM

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wintry oxide I know I read somewhere that the errors I'm getting could be from not having arc...

Omarchy iso uses archinstaller to install arch first

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I haven't installed omarchy via the image, so I don't know what might be the issue

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It's far easier to do a manual installation at this point

wintry oxide Oct 6, 2025, 8:49 PM

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feels like it would be

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alright I'll just do that I suppose

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ill let you know how it goes

shell mural Oct 6, 2025, 8:50 PM

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Sure

shell mural Oct 6, 2025, 8:50 PM

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wintry oxide ill let you know how it goes

follow the arch wiki

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do use deepseek or any other agents if you're stuck, or don't understand anything

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especially the encryption section

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You can tag me, as well

wintry oxide Oct 7, 2025, 5:46 PM

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@shell mural figured it out after about 12 hours of banging my head against a wall last night. Turns out that to run any arch-based installer on my specific PC model (HP Omen Transcend) I had to add boot parameters to it, specifically “noapic” and/or “pci=nobar”. Was silently going into kernel panic every time previously and this allowed me to run the archinstall. I also had to add them to limine.conf cmdline for it to boot any time after that, even with Omarchy now running

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Side note, my laptop touchpad is now disabled so I’m working on fixing that

shell mural Oct 7, 2025, 5:48 PM

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wintry oxide <@870732620722487296> figured it out after about 12 hours of banging my head aga...

I also had to add them to limine.conf cmdline for it to boot any time after that

Yeah that's how kernel params work

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but why exactly?

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so basically the kernel doesn't support your hardware?

wintry oxide Oct 7, 2025, 5:50 PM

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Idk something about this specific model’s hardware. Found somebody having Linux install issues on this post and did a gpt 5 deep research to come up with a plan to get it working

https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Hardware-and-Upgrade-Questions/Solved-installing-Linux-on-HP-Omen-Laptops/m-p/9025622/highlight/false#M739408

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Not just arch but any Linux

shell mural Oct 7, 2025, 5:52 PM

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wintry oxide Idk something about this specific model’s hardware. Found somebody having Linux ...

I'm reading a reddit post that links the same article

shell mural Oct 7, 2025, 5:52 PM

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wintry oxide Not just arch but any Linux

Ik

wintry oxide Oct 7, 2025, 5:52 PM

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Apparently many Omens have an ACPI/interrupt routing bug that causes kernel panic

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There are some people who came up with a patch so I’m trying to implement it

shell mural Oct 7, 2025, 5:53 PM

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Looks like a tedious process to get linux working properly

shell mural Oct 7, 2025, 5:53 PM

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wintry oxide There are some people who came up with a patch so I’m trying to implement it

I hope you get it working

wintry oxide Oct 7, 2025, 5:53 PM

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Me and you both

wintry oxide Oct 7, 2025, 5:54 PM

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shell mural Looks like a tedious process to get linux working properly

Really the only tedious part was figuring out it was a hardware-specific issue in the first place, but maybe I should’ve googled omens + Linux issues beforehand

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Kinda wishing I had a diff laptop but this is the one I’ve got and can’t afford another so here we are

shell mural Oct 7, 2025, 5:54 PM

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wintry oxide Kinda wishing I had a diff laptop but this is the one I’ve got and can’t afford ...

These are tough times

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I've got a old crappy hp laptop as well

wintry oxide Oct 7, 2025, 5:55 PM

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I mean my home lab is a refurbished HP Z440 tower from like 2014 and it booted the omarchy .iso with absolutely no issues

shell mural Oct 7, 2025, 5:55 PM

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It's a 2015 envy

wintry oxide Oct 7, 2025, 5:55 PM

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That’s why I was so confused

wintry oxide Oct 7, 2025, 5:56 PM

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shell mural It's a 2015 envy

Used to be an envy guy, nice laptops

shell mural Oct 7, 2025, 5:56 PM

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wintry oxide I mean my home lab is a refurbished HP Z440 tower from like 2014 and it booted t...

Linux is goat reviving old systems

wintry oxide Oct 7, 2025, 5:56 PM

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shell mural Linux is goat reviving old systems

Frfr that thing runs like a dream

shell mural Oct 7, 2025, 5:56 PM

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This is what I enjoy most tbh

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pushing old systems to their limits

wintry oxide Oct 7, 2025, 5:57 PM

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It was only $500 and came with 4.5 TBs of storage and 32 gigs of mem

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Silky smooth with omarchy

shell mural Oct 7, 2025, 5:57 PM

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wintry oxide It was only $500 and came with 4.5 TBs of storage and 32 gigs of mem

That's neat

wintry oxide Oct 7, 2025, 5:57 PM

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While my supposedly “cutting-edge” laptop has an inoperable touchpad and is having screen tearing issues🙃🙃🙃

wintry oxide Oct 7, 2025, 5:58 PM

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shell mural That's neat

Shoutout eBay

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Refurbished workstations are excellent home labs

shell mural Oct 7, 2025, 5:58 PM

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wintry oxide While my supposedly “cutting-edge” laptop has an inoperable touchpad and is havi...

Someone might add the relevant modules to future kernel releases

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you'll have to make do with patches for now

wintry oxide Oct 7, 2025, 5:58 PM

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Ya

shell mural Oct 7, 2025, 5:59 PM

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wintry oxide Refurbished workstations are excellent home labs

Indeed

wintry oxide Oct 7, 2025, 5:59 PM

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shell mural Someone might add the relevant modules to future kernel releases

Any way to notify the Omarchy devs that this is an issue?

shell mural Oct 7, 2025, 5:59 PM

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wintry oxide Any way to notify the Omarchy devs that this is an issue?

Omarchy devs aren't kernel devs

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It's more of a DE

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like gnome

wintry oxide Oct 7, 2025, 5:59 PM

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Meant more as just a “hey this should be a FAQ” or sumn

shell mural Oct 7, 2025, 5:59 PM

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I'll see what I can do about it

wintry oxide Oct 7, 2025, 6:00 PM

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Oh okay thanks

shell mural Oct 7, 2025, 6:00 PM

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Maybe make an issue on github, but it's more of a linux problem

wintry oxide Oct 7, 2025, 6:00 PM

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Tru

wintry oxide Oct 7, 2025, 7:56 PM

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Omarchy will not move past initial splash screen or archiso login messages on HP Omen

wintry oxide Oct 9, 2025, 11:18 PM

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@shell mural fed a bunch of sources and my ACPI dump files into a deep research prompt on Gemini, turns out HP Omens have a bunch of power routing tables that straight up disable themselves if you load up something other than windows. So throw Linux on there and they just shut off. Working on a patch process for my firmware version that I’ll share with the arch community once I finish

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Hopefully can make it reproducible for other users

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There is also an alternate solution where you basically throw in a kernel param that pretends you’re running windows so I may try that before I mess with the acpi stuff

wintry oxide Oct 14, 2025, 3:01 PM

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wintry oxide There is also an alternate solution where you basically throw in a kernel param ...

Update @shell mural I tried the kernel param to spoof a windows OSI response to the firmware, didn't work

shell mural Oct 15, 2025, 3:07 AM

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wintry oxide Update <@870732620722487296> I tried the kernel param to spoof a windows OSI res...

That's a bummer

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I'll try to look into it as well

wintry oxide Oct 20, 2025, 5:48 PM

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shell mural That's a bummer

Update: I managed to fix the speakers & touchpad. Required me to rewrite the ACPI tables that govern how the firmware interacts with hardware but I got it working. Probably going to publish the results on my GitHub so other omen users can get it working in the future

shell mural Oct 21, 2025, 1:44 AM

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wintry oxide Update: I managed to fix the speakers & touchpad. Required me to rewrite the ACP...

That's neat

#Omarchy will not move past initial splash screen or archiso login messages on HP Omen