elephantintheroom

Success! After a lot of trial and error, I narrowed it down to one file. The culprit was vfio-pci.cfg. I haven't yet looked into what this is or why this caused issues - any idea? I haven't had the server up and running long, but nothing yet seems to have broken without this file. In case someone has the same problem, my solution was to back up my original USB stick, do a fresh install on that stick, copy over the contents of the backed-up config folder WITHOUT vfio-pci.cfg. It's possible that purely just deleting this file from the original USB setup might also solve the issue - so I'd probably try that first. Thanks for your help.

Thanks, I created a fresh install on a different USB stick and that worked fine. How would you suggest to proceed? Is there a way of figuring out what config setting is causing the issue?

Not quite sure the implication of this, but I can still ping the server. The boot screen is still stuck at the message in the original post though....

This morning, I updated to 6.12.0. After rebooting the server, the boot terminal gets to the following line and then hangs (the cursor stops blinking): NET: Registered PF_UNIX/PF_LOCAL protocol family I have tried booting into safe mode/no GUI, it always hangs on the same line. My processor is a 9th Gen Intel (not 11th Gen, which I understand has issues). And the BIOS config hasn't been changed since I performed the updated. Does anyone have any advice on how to proceed? Let me know if some other info/diagnostics would help to diagnose. Thanks