I am guessing that your hard drive is an SSD, I have had an SSD in the past which gave good smart data but was failing badly all the same. If you have a spare hard drive that can be used to try instead then that would be a good thing to try.
Edit: I have seen SSD drives on Windows with a proper installation go bad and couldn't find a reason for it. No virus, no torrenting, not a whole lot of anything except the registry was all over the place with crosslinks everywhere. Maybe an update failed at the wrong moment due to power outage or a forced restart. It could just be down to bathtub curve failure.
Also it would be worthwhile to test the ram on your PC, there may be a pre boot option to do this in your UEFI/BIOS setup utility.

superdecker64 After getting frustrated I just started toggling a bunch of bios settings. Probably not a great idea but it ended up working! I think ...

Are you sure you have corrected what you did in BIOS. ? Then I would suggest go for a clean install of Solus.

    [deleted]
    Western Digital 1TB WD Blue PC Internal Hard Drive HDD - 7200 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, 64 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD10EZEX https://a.co/d/9UKsoKP
    This is the drive
    Disabling the sata controller makes the live launcher boot, yeah, altough there are two drives listed despite me only using one. I thought the one that was listed was my old broken drive I was too lazy to remove but I just opened up my PC and removed it today and it wasn't actually plugged in and now both drives are still listed in the bios. I didn't see any drive in there, googling the device name brings up an SSD but I didn't see one in there and looking at my PC model up it didn't come with one, and I didn't install one, so no idea what's going on there. Is there a way to disable SATA ports individually through like a command or something so I can test whether it's the phantom drive doing this or not?

        If the SSD was unplugged it shouldn't have made a difference to Solus booting, it is still worth unplugging the WD drive and trying to boot again from your USB stick with no hard drive connected.
        Usually the only place your previous drives will be listed is where the bios records the path to the boot image. This should not cause any problems with booting from a USB.

          • [deleted]

          • Post #21
          • Edited

          superdecker64 Where exactly are the drives listed in the BIOS? Is there a possibility you could provide a photo of that list containing the phantom drive?

          BuzzPCSOS I think the Solus boot is waiting the broken drive for something, times out and fails the boot.

                If the defective drive was at one time set manually it would still be listed in bios probably
                and not set to auto detect.
                If it was set auto it should not be shown if it was unplugged.

                So maybe it is hanging looking for that drive because its set manually.
                Remove it in bios the defective one.
                But bios should have complained about it at boot
                I agree post a screen shot

                Hi, sorry for the delay, and I appreciate everyone replying! I fixed it, there was in fact an SSD installed, little bastard was hiding under the graphics card which was the only thing I didn't take out when trying to trouble shoot until now. Thing wasn't on any of the specs I saw around online and for some reason Acer took down the manual that actually showed a motherboard diagram that I used last time (to put in the drive im now currently using) and replaced it with a generic one, so there was absolutely no way I would have found that on my own, thank you Tech Deals on youtube! Anyways everything's working great now! Live loaders all work just fine, and booting up is way faster too! Windows also isn't being a weird janky mess anymore too, so it really was just that one SSD fucking everything up I guess.

                Anyways thanks you all for your help! Really appreciate you all replying, helped me stay somewhat sane through the frustration lmao. I'm running the solus installer now, and it's seeming to work fine! Will pop back in if something different breaks but the original problem is resolved, thank you all for your help again and I'm sure I'll see you all around on the forum again at some point!

                Off topic question, but there's nothing I can do with the broken SSD right? At this point I kinda want to buy a bunch of safety gear and take a hammer to the thing after dealing with all that lol

                Okay, already back, oof xD
                So installer gets like, 70% and throws up an error saying "the bootloader could not be installed. the installation command <pre>clr-boot-managet update</pre> returned error code 1."

                Here's my install log
                https://termbin.com/xj5d

                I think it might just be storage corruption, I had tried to install it once more before this point but while waiting for it to finish, I didn't realize the live loader auto locks after five minutes of inactivity, and while fumbling around in the password thing I think I glitched something cause it got stuck on a black screen and I had to restart. Trying formatting the drive now, but figured I'd go ahead and put the log up in case it's not the storage thing and any of you recognize it

                  Rather embarrassingly, I can't figure out how to format the partition. Windows doesn't have the partition show up now (which fair enough since that's technically Linux territory even if said Linux is borked), KDE partition manager in the live loader doesn't seem to want to let me do anything with it either, there's a lock icon and the only thing selectable for it is unmount (which just tells me I can't unmount)

                  Sorry for the additional bother Dx

                  Update, restart fixed that issue, partition deleted, gonna try installing again.

                  Update 2: nope, same error Dx

                    superdecker64 Glad you found the issue and made progress I am not up
                    on installing with windows but others here are and am sure they will chime in at some point.
                    If you need help

                        • [deleted]

                        • Post #28

                        superdecker64 If you're installing Solus alongside Windows, most likely your EFI partition is too small.

                        There's a known bug in the KDE version live environment that it can't be unlocked after it gets locked. So turn off screen locking from the screen locker settings before launching the installer.

                            Axios yeeee thanks!
                            [deleted] hi, thanks for responding! Will make the efi partition bigger and see if that does any thing.

                            And yeah, started doing that after the first time. Kinda weird it's on by default by oh well