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[SOLVED] Can't boot from USB

As the title says, i am trying to boot from a USB with artix on but unable to. I am trying to boot from a thinkpad t440. I have disabled secure boot and enabled both uefi and legacy in that order of priority. I just get a black screen when choosing the usb which appears in the boot menu which have the artix iso on it.

I have tried numerous different times and with different methods, none of them worked.
I have tried with the open-rc and runit base image.
I made the first USB from the command line with dd and a blocksize of 2M.
Later i tried using RUFUS and balenaEtcher on a windows10 laptop.
I tried two different USB sticks, one usb3.0 and one 2.0 stick with the exact same results.
In RUFUS i tried both dd and iso mode, and both gpt and mbr partition table. When trying to boot from a USB made with iso-mode i get into grub-rescue and not a just a black screen like i got with dd mode and balenaEtcher.

In the past using dd or balenaEtcher have just worked both with artix and other images. I tried a usb with the newest debian netinstall iso which was able to boot on both different sticks using both dd and rufus iso mode. Interestingly i tried with the newest devuan netinstall iso as well and that didn't boot. I could try with an artix iso with desktop enviroment. But i would really prefer the base image with either runit or open-rc. Maybe i will try with vanilla arch as well just to see.

Does anyone of you know what i can try to do, i really like the artix base image and have used it on the same thinkpad in the past with zero issues. I will answer any question and provide more detail if anyone asks. Thanks in advance!

Re: Can't boot from USB

Reply #1 –

 I don't think you should use the base iso from the way you sound you might not be prepared. Base iso is a black screen. Try hit ctr alt f1 but before that give it some more time to boot if you didn't make it to a tty or a shell.

If some of the iso you said it worked why not using those?

Re: Can't boot from USB

Reply #3 –
Quote from: Surf3r – on

 I don't think you should use the base iso from the way you sound you might not be prepared. Base iso is a black screen. Try hit ctr alt f1 but before that give it some more time to boot if you didn't make it to a tty or a shell.

If some of the iso you said it worked why not using those?


apologies if i sound wierd, english is not my first language. By black screen i mean totally black, not showing grub either. I have been using linux for three years and have installed the base image many times before, my only problem is trying to boot from a usb with the artix image on.

Im not using the debian image that works because i want to use artix, yaknow?

Re: Can't boot from USB

Reply #4 –
Quote
english is not my first language
I didn't mean your English is bad just you sound a bit inexperienced.

Try giving it more time to boot. t440 doesn't sound to me like a blazing fast machine and booting from a usb in general is slow.

slow+slow=superslow

Let it boot 10-15 minutes. Linux kernel isn't that lightweight, there's a whole discussion around this. When you managed to boot perhaps that kernel was around 80MB at that time in size but now the kernel is about 130MB.

After you mange to install on your main disk it will boot much faster but booting from a usb isn't at all fast.

Re: Can't boot from USB

Reply #5 –
ah ok im gonna try to wait for 15 min. You may be right about the kernel it is indeed heavier today, but it has never been like this before and like i said, other heavier distros boot nice and fast from usb. i have probably booted from usb 100 times and always been pretty fast. The t440 isnt a potato either, and the usb 3.0 stick is pretty fast too. thanks for replying anyway :D

Re: Can't boot from USB

Reply #6 –

 You could try opt either for UEFI or legacy but not both. Make it so the system determines much quicker hopefully what it needs to choose for your hardware.

Re: Can't boot from USB

Reply #7 –
i have tried to let it boot for 15 minutes and opting out of UEFI or legacy. the result is still the same unfortunately.

Re: Can't boot from USB

Reply #9 –

 When you boot from usb the system not only reads but also writes even if those are volatile files. Increase dd block-size from 2 to 4, 6 or  even 10. You don't need to write it that compact/zipped but in this case something like 10MB would make more sense.

Code: [Select]
# dd if=/home/john/Downloads/whatever.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=6M status=progress

Write down the time it takes to dd that image and multiply it by 2 or 3. It's that long you have to wait till it boots assuming you create that dd iso with the help of the target machine t440 🎯.. If still fails it could be some hardware issue. Make sure you're not using weekly iso in case you forgot bout this.

Double check with lsblk what's your device/usb you need to write to. Unplug any other usb when you boot.

Re: Can't boot from USB

Reply #10 –
If you are asking how to get around this bug, rather than generally reporting it's existence, there are several ways. A base install essentially requires a bootable OS with a few tools to install the required packages , then you configure them and chroot in to make an initcpio and possibly set up grub unless you are booting from another grub.  You can install from another partition, even if it's a different distro, there are guides online. You could use an older iso, for a base install you will still pull the latest packages from the repo, so long as it's not so old it can't find them it should give you the same results. You can also use an Artix GUI iso to do a base install if any of those boot, just open a terminal , the base install tools should be there, plus they might have Gparted to configure the partition easily. You might even be able to remove the drive and put it in another machine or external enclosure and install and set up like that. You still might need to chroot in and re-run mkinitcpio and possibly tweak some things after replacing it though.

For dd, the block size should be the native block size which is nearly always the default value, so it's best to not specify block size at all. While it's interesting to see what happens when waiting longer, I have some laptops older than that and they are not that slow to boot. The dd time should be slower than the boot time because write speed is usually slower than read speed, and not all files on the iso need to be read to boot

Re: Can't boot from USB

Reply #11 –
 
It writes a lot too. It reads and writes so time should be like I said bigger than dd time. You could benchmark your usb and see ~ how long it takes to read/write 700MB. When you choose small blocksize, reads and writes speed drop significantly and only certain small files are r/w faster.

The performance of the usb stick over times drops also.

 Some usb stick specify to not use them to boot from them. Their controller sometimes fail. Controller is responsible with the fashion/algorithm data is being written. That thing ensures data uses the whole flash memory so it wears out slower but even with that at some point will fail completely. When you shred files flash memory wears out even faster.

edit: little known thing is it's better to have your stick formatted ext4 as if it's fat32 that file system doesn't support ownership you can't be root on a fat32 so it can conflict between fat32 lack of privileges and iso 9660 format. Everything you write as root on a fat32 fs it will belong to everybody not just the root and when you dd the image you'll write it on top of a fat32. So there can be a possible conflict.



Re: Can't boot from USB

Reply #12 –
it did finally boot with ventoy using grub2 mode. any idea why it doesn't with normal mode or the iso alone with the grub version it ships with? tried the older archive iso as well with the same results. well im just glad im finally able to boot. thanks for the help :)

Re: [SOLVED] Can't boot from USB

Reply #13 –
@Surf3r

I do respect your ability to take various, only slightly related, facts then juggle plus amalgamate until what comes out the other end is so far from reality it's almost entertaining yet generally entirely spurious. Though to the less experienced might sound plausible.

Just for instance what difference does the existent filesystem on the usb make when you are overwriting it with an image? (The answer is none. That's why it's little known. Because it's not the case.).
 

Re: [SOLVED] Can't boot from USB

Reply #14 –

@gripped I'm still not convinced why with dd fails. If it works with those n00bish tools like ventoy coming from windoz realm, linux tools should be better I guess. As the way it went/solved sounds like windoz knows what's better for linux in linux house which more than not is incorrect.

Why it fails with dd then? Linux tools are bad? Common.