ISO fails to boot via Ventoy, installer hangs on black screen with cursor

[rothgar]

Describe the package

I tried installing on a Surface Go 2. It currently has Fedora 38 beta which installed without issues.

When booting from ublue I receive an error before getting to a GUI or installation options.

dracut-initqueue: Unknown device: "/dev//run/install/repo//images/install.img": No such device
dracut-initqueue: Unknown device "/sys/": no such device

I've only tried booting from the main silverblue ISO

Image

Silverblue

[castrojo]

New ISOs have been generated, try this one please!

https://github.com/ublue-os/main/releases/tag/v1.1.0

[rothgar]

That one still says it won't work via USB stick/ventoy. Should it work outside of VM?

[akdev1l]

we're still developing and testing this - so we are aware of it not working atm on real hardware

[castrojo]

Thanks for your patience Justin, give this one a shot:

https://github.com/ublue-os/main/releases/tag/v1.1.7

[rothgar]

This one boots to grub 🙌 I need to make a backup before I wipe the computer and install.

[rothgar]

I tried with 1.1.7 and 1.1.8 and got the same error

I tried with ventoy using the memdisk boot and I don't get the same error but it stops at

1 Started plymouth-start .service - Show Plymouth Boot Screen.
1 Started systend-ask-password-plywouth.path - Forward Password Requests
1 Reached target cryptsetup. target - Local Encrypted Volumes.
1 Reached target paths. target - Path Units.
1 Started cancel-wultipath-wait-nunc@ni.tiwer - cancel waiting for nultip
1 Finished systend-udeu-settle.service - Wait for udev to Complete Device Initialization, Starting wultipathd.service - Device-Mapper Multipath Deuice Controller..
1 Started wultipathd.service - Deuice-Mapper Multipath Deuice Controller.
1 Reached target local-Is-pre.target - Preparation for Local File Systems.
1 Reached target local-fs.target - Local File Systems.
1 Reached target sysinit.target - System Initialization.
Reached target basic.target - Basic System.
•
Started cancel-waltipath-wait-nunc@ni.service - cancel waiting for multipath siblings of numeOn1.

[akdev1l]

Ventoy probably won't work at this time.

We need to do some "creative" writing to get that to work - keep an eye out for updates!

Thanks for testing and reporting back!

[rothgar]

I'm sure it would work on my Lenovo but I need that for work. Will keep an eye on progress

[bigpod98]

If you have an usb that you can "flash"(using etcher, fedora mediawriter ...) iso on instead of using ventoy it should work, as ventoy is causing us a lot of problems at this time

[rothgar]

I originally tried that with a couple of my USB drives. I have a drive that I usually use for installs (I've had it for 15 years). I tried flashing with a disk restore and with etcher and my computer won't boot from it. It boots from the fedora 38 iso and with ventoy but not with ublue.

[bigpod98]

Im sorry to hear that

[akdev1l]

@rothgar thanks a lot for the report!

could you share the configuration of the system? what does "won't boot from it" mean?

is the drive not detected as bootable? is it detected as bootable but doesn't load grub? it loads grub but never gets to anaconda? Knowing what specific failure condition we have triggered will be very valuable

lastly could you also share:

1. Is the system UEFI? If so does it have CSM(legacy boot) enabled?
2. If the system is UEFI, have you tried booting in legacy mode?

[rothgar]

Sorry for not providing that earlier. I did some more testing last night and here's what I found.

The main device I'm trying to install ublue on is a surface go 2. It only has UEFI and does not have a legacy boot option. I have disabled secure boot and set USB to be the first boot device. When I try to boot from a USB drive flashed with ublue it bypasses the USB like it's not bootable. There's not prompt to select it. If I try to load the boot menu it continues to boot from the first nvme drive. It boots ventoy without problems.

I tried with the same, non-ventoy USB device on my Lenovo x1 carbon (gen 7) last night and ublue installer boots just fine. It's Also booting in UEFI mode and has secure boot enabled. The Ventoy drive doesn't boot on the lenovo because it gets an error from secure boot.

When I booted the installer on my lenovo I saw the original error message in the output

dracut-initqueue: Unknown device: "/dev//run/install/repo//images/install.img": No such device
dracut-initqueue: Unknown device "/sys/": no such device

but then it continued to boot so I'm guessing the error I'm getting stuck on with the surface go 2 is not the actual error and there's something else happening. I'm going to try with other USB devices next week and see if any of them work. Do you know if ublue will load from a PXE server, that was my next idea if USB doesn't work.

[akdev1l]

@rothgar thanks a lot for such a detailed response!

some follow up questions:

1. Your surface is able to boot upstream Fedora ISOs correctly?
2. From what I gather you were able to boot into the ISO by using Ventoy with the surface but the installer hangs before anaconda correct? (this is a known issue with Ventoy + anaconda, we're trying to work around it)
3. Network boot should work but honestly I don't think we have tried, we have an internal goal to integrate with https://netboot.xyz/ so you trying this is very interesting. If it doesn't work it means we have another thing to fix.

From your report it seems as if the surface laptop does not support booting from a CD-ROM? (this would mean upstream ISOs don't work on it?) this documentation seems to confirm that: https://superuser.com/questions/771689/surface-pro-wont-boot-from-usb - they recommend trying Rufus which has the ability to transform a "legacy" ISO (like ours) into a properly bootable EFI disk

[rothgar]

1. Yes. I install fedora 38 from upstream using the ISO flashed directly to a USB drive
2. correct. I just confirmed with the upstream fedora image and ventoy. It doesn't boot in exactly the same way as ublue. Good to know this isn't a ublue problem
3. I don't currently have a PXE stack but I can look into it because I need it for another project

I'll try rufus and see if it works. Thanks for the tip

[rothgar]

I tried a bunch of stuff last night and none of it was successful.

I tried flashing 3 different USB drives with the iso. I also tried rufus with ISO mode (file copy) and dd mode. With rufus I tried MBR and GPT partitioning and fat32 and NTFS. I lost track of how many different combinations I tried and the only thing that would boot something besides the installed fedora distro was GPT partitioning with NTFS. But that would only dump me to GRUB and not continue.

I also tried a fedora ISO and it wouldn't boot when flashing the USB drive with the ISO. It appears the only thing this device will boot is ventoy. I have no idea why.

Good news is booting on this device isn't a ublue problem. Bad news is I still can't try it until it works with ventoy.

Reading my last comment, I'm guessing my memory failed me and I didn't install fedora with a direct ISO clone to USB. I probably used ventoy to install fedora.

[akdev1l]

Okay that is actually good news (for us, sorry about your specific case!)

It means we are just as bootable as the upstream ISO (you had me worrying there).

I will ping here after I have something to test. We're going to patch the squashfs of the ISO and try to add the kickstart there. We hope that this will workaround the anaconda bug that is being triggered by Ventoy. (And we also hope this will let us add drivers to the installer as well)

[adokitkat]

Hi, I am bumping this because I use Ventoy with all other .iso files and it works perfectly, so ideally this should too. Thank you.

[castrojo]

Hi there,we're getting

This issue was filed on old ISOs. We have a new ISO generation tool, check here for download instructions:

https://universal-blue.org/installation/

The new ISOs use a more reliable method of creation and should work much better, thanks! We've got confirmed reports that Ventoy is now working!