This is a very odd bug that is difficult to explain. Whenever I restart, there
is a chance that my laptop (ASUS K501UW) will fail to boot past initial
ramdisk. The way to get around this is very complex and when it works is kind
of random, which might mean that the methods I use to work around it only
happen to cause some of the things that allow the laptop to boot successfully
again.

Any one or any number of these steps, roughly in the order that I wrote them,
appears to sometimes cause the laptop to boot successfully, but only sometimes:

- Boot from a snapshot from 2020-11-27 (my 2nd oldest snapshot) using kernel
5.8.4
- Boot from the next snapshot with 5.8.4, then the next one and so on.
- Boot from the latest snapshot in read-only mode using 5.8.4
- Boot from the latest snapshot (not read-only, normal mode) using 5.8.4
- Boot from the latest snapshot with the latest kernel (not read-only, recovery
mode)

Eventually, booting normally with the latest kernel will work.

Unfortunately, I can't say how to reproduce this bug because I have no idea how
or why it happens.

Additional info:

I have kernel 5.8.4 locked so that I don't lose it.

It began happening a few months ago, probably after upgrading from kernel 5.8.4
to a new version, but I kept putting off writing a bug report because I was
able to work around it and I was busy.

I usually only reboot after doing a distro-upgrade and otherwise prefer to put
the laptop into sleep mode when I'm done using it for the day. Sometimes I wait
a whole week with 2 or more distro upgrades before rebooting.