On Mon, Nov 28, 2016 at 03:25:16AM +0000, niya levi via arch-general wrote: > yes > in locale.gen i uncommented the following and ran locale-gen > en_US.UTF-8 > en_GB.UTF-8 > > locale.conf has > lang=en_GB.UTF-8 > > vconsole.conf has > KEYMAP=uk > > when booting it gets past the grub stage > it print booting linux > then loading ramdisk > then the whatever follows displays unreadable block character. > shadrock Just to check, does "locale -c charmap" return UTF-8? If yes, then it seems there is an issue with your default console font (I assume you didn't put anything like this on the kernel command line). So, try changing the console font either by the kernel cmdline or at runtime in a tty console: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fonts#Console_fonts . Also, what is your graphics card, and how do you load the graphics driver (automatically, early in ramdisk via MODULES= in mkinitcpio.conf, etc.)? Try booting with nomodeset at the kernel cmdline to disable KMS and see if your fonts get back to normal... Cheers, -- Leonid Isaev GPG fingerprints: DA92 034D B4A8 EC51 7EA6 20DF 9291 EE8A 043C B8C4 C0DF 20D0 C075 C3F1 E1BE 775A A7AE F6CB 164B 5A6D