Arch Linux woes: \vmlinuz-linux not found

Just a quick one in case you encounter this problem when you try to boot your Arch system. This article applies in particular if your system has otherwise been stable, but is now failing after an update.

The error was along the lines of Unable to launch arch linux, \vmlinuz-linux not found

• Boot from a live disk and chroot in.
• Check the file /etc/mkinitcpio.d/linux.preset and its contents.
• If it’s blank (or not there at all), this is what is causing the issue.
• Delete the blank file
• Reinstall the kernel to trigger mkinitcpio etc. pacman -S linux

I don’t know how that file got blank, I think an update went wrong at some point. Someone in IRC said they have seen it a few times. Anyway, it cost me an evening (funnily enough the first time in 10 years with Arch) and the solution was face-slappingly simple.

The two tell-tale signs were:

• No initramfs in /boot
• mkinitcpio -p linux gave no output at all. Normally it gives progress updates.

Please note that this might not be your issue. There are lots of places you might have typos, there may be issues with your boot partition - I got to this solution after checking all that. If you just installed Arch and never got it to boot once, this article is less likely to be useful to you.