Can't boot Live USB

richieheijmans

Walt no I have AMD.

salexandarz

did you formated your usb as fat32?

Justin

salexandarz The USB doesn't need to be formatted, when you write the ISO directly it will create it's own filesystem.

Axios

do a lspci command see if you get a output like this to see at the bottom if its loading the amdgpu also make sure your motherboard bios is up to date.
84:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Device 731f (rev c1) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
Subsystem: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Device 0b36
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 100, NUMA node 1
Memory at e0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
Memory at f0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=2M]
I/O ports at f000
Memory at fbc00000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=512K]
Expansion ROM at fbc80000 [disabled] [size=128K]
Capabilities: <access denied>
Kernel driver in use: amdgpu
Kernel modules: amdgpu

Walt

The thing is, if the USB stick was formatted wrong, it wouldn't boot at all- it would just go back out to the motherboard BIOS screen. It goes all the way to what should be the desktop, only the desktop is black (on both monitors) and the mouse cursor is a typical Linux one and can traverse between the monitors. My guess is that it is installing the Newwst Nvidia driver (448.85 I think) which still has lots of issues that I've run into myself. Version 440 is the most recent confirmed stable. In other linux distros the Nouveau driver works fine. I might try to get it to load that driver while still on the select os screen.

Justin

Walt The live ISO doesn't contain the NVIDIA proprietary driver at all. It only uses nouveau for NVIDIA cards until you install and then you can optionally install the proprietary driver.

rotorrad

Hi folks, so is there something being done about live USB disk not working? I've spent 2 days trying, formating USB pen drive on windows, mac. No luck. I can install any other distro no problem. EFI disk shows and gets on with the installation. I was really looking forward to use this particular distro.

Junglist

rotorrad Have you tried the dd (command line / terminal) method on mac?

I always use dd method (on Linux), it's 100% reliable, just follow the instructions, and make sure you select the correct disk.

WetGeek

Junglist I always use dd method (on Linux), it's 100% reliable

Isn't Etcher just a GUI wrapper for DD?

DataDrake

WetGeek No, etcher uses a similar process of writing, but not dd itself.

jcrabapple

I'm having similar issues. I've tried a few different USB flash drives, I've redownloaded the ISO a few times, and I've used several apps to write the image to the drive including Gnome MultiWriter, Etcher, and dd. Secure boot is disabled in my BIOS. Image attached.

adurante

jcrabapple Stupid suggestion and anecdotal, have you tried a different USB port on the machine itself? I had this error once before and as ridiculous as it sounds it went away when I tried a different usb port.

Harvey

jcrabapple
On reddit you've stated your laptop is a Lenovo IdeaPad 3 17ARE05.

All of those appear to have AMD Ryzen 4000U series CPUs. Which did not exist when the current ISO was released (January 2020). So I would put money on the kernel the current ISO ships with not supporting your hardware maybe some mesalib issue too. The ISO will be updated when these tasks are finished https://dev.getsol.us/T8629

Solus stable repository currently has 5.6.18. The 5.6.19 kernel is likely the last in the 5.6 series meaning 5.7.x would be around the corner. Hopefully that will ship with 4.2.

Quick google search shows https://forum.manjaro.org/t/configuring-amd-ryzen-4500u-laptop/144712/6 it is unclear if he is including 5.6.x series as kernels that won't boot or just kernels that don't support his hardware properly.

However 5.8 is currently a release candidate and one user on their forums (later in the thread) is still experiencing issues with freezes so 🤷‍♂️

jcrabapple

adurante Hey thanks for the reply! I've tried all 3 USB ports on the laptop.

jcrabapple

Harvey Thanks for the reply! My suspicion is that it's the kernel (5.4 in the ISO I believe) but there must be something missing from the Solus 5.4 kernel that is in other distros' kernels because I can boot Ubuntu which is on 5.4 OOB. I would really love to run Solus on this laptop but I guess I will just have to be patient for the next release.

Harvey

jcrabapple
Makes sense come to think of it. 5.4 series is an LTS kernel so it will get fixes and some hardware support added for years to come. They likely have a kernel in the 5.4 series newer than the 5.4.12 that shipped with Solus 4.1 ISO.

If you're curious you can boot off the ISO of a distro that works, check which kernel is being used by running uname -r

But yeah sounds like you'll have to wait till 4.2 only alternative is putting the sdd in another system, installing Solus, update, shutdown, move ssd back... kinda a PITA.

liontiger23

Had the same issue with the new Ryzen 4000 series laptop. Ended up installing Solus 4.1 on 16G usb stick (using the other computer), fully updating it and then dd'ing usb drive to the laptop ssd.
It worked surprisingly fine. The most painful and slow process was waiting for eopkg up on usb stick.

Couple of notes:

In order to create a separate bootloader on usb stick, I had to physically unplug boot drive of my PC, which was used to install Solus on usb stick. On the page where you choose the name for the system during installation process, there will be drop-down box for the location of bootloader. For me the only option was my existing bootloader, until I unplugged that drive.
After installation on usb, doing eopkg up was more painful then usual.
- During package download it hanged for a long time on some package, so I just Ctrl-C that, restarted update and it kept going.
- I initially ran eopkg up from terminal in DE, but during update the OS tried to go to sleep and I could not login back to DE. And since I did not forward output of eopkg up to any file, I was unable to determine if it was doing anything or hanged up again. So I killed eopkg from tty, rebooted, and now was unable to login into DE at all.
- So from tty eopkg check and eopkg rdb indicated that all installed packages were fine, but eopkg up failed with the same error as in https://discuss.getsol.us/d/4996-help-with-ssl-certificate-error.
- After running the command from the issue eopkg up continued, but after everything was installed, it stuck on Syncing filesystems. I read somewhere, that this might be due to some issues with removable devices, and suggested workaround was to plug/unplug those devices. But my OS was on the "removable" device.
- So I killed eopkg again and rebooted. But eopkg up now said that all packages are up to date, so I tried installing some package (e.g. eopkg it neofetch) and then it installed and finished all that stuff that it didn't do during system update -- properly updating kernel, users etc.

Maybe someone will find this troubleshooting experience helpful. In the future I think I'll just be doing initial eopkg up from tty to avoid some of the encountered issues.

The good thing is that the new kernel 5.10 should be released soon, which is the only remaining task in https://dev.getsol.us/T8629 at the moment. So hopefully we will get the new Solus 4.2 image soon.