Boot freezes at "Loading initial ramdisk"

I have cloned and built the latest rc kernel using the default config but on boot, it stucks at "Loading initial ramdisk". I have tried booting after removing the "quiet" option from the kernel parameters just before selecting the kernel from the grub menu. I have also tried adding "dis_ucode_ldr" parameter to the initial parameters but all in vain.

How to look for the underlying issue and solve it?