I’ve been trying to boot a Ubuntu 24.04 USB (please no discussion of distro choice) but I keep getting a very unhelpful error during the initial startup. I’ve tried using a different USB drive, a different USB port, booting from UEFI. The only thing that has made a change was booting into safe graphics mode. It got to the install wizard but when I got to the end of the wizard it gave me other seemingly useless error messages.

I’m concerned there’s an issue with my motherboard but I don’t have strong evidence to support this idea. I recently took a trip where the computer was fine before I left. I turned it off while I was away and when I came back my main drive no longer worked. I couldn’t boot from it or even see the drive in gparted. I’ve replaced the drive without issue though. If my motherboard is somehow going bad, it’s being very subtle about it. I was ready to blame Nvidia but when I got it into safe graphics mode, it didn’t get to the point of having Nvidia drivers.

Does anyone have any idea what might be going on or any way I can get additional information about the errors I’m getting? The lack of information is really frustrating.

  • Rentlar
    2•29 days ago

    If there’s an installer bug, probably not much you can do at the current moment, but the advice is for anyone trying to get any install working in general:

    It would be good to have basic information about your system like model of graphics card, CPU, amount of RAM and motherboard. How long have you had the PC with it working?

    Software things to check:

    • what do dmesg and /var/log say? (ETA: at the part you are at in the distro idk if you can access the graphical terminal, the virtual tty. You can try the debug mode root shell if they have that with the live disk) Anything that stands out as major error categories?
    • How did you set up the USB drive? Dd? Ventoy? Rufus? I’ve helped someone install Ubuntu 22.04 recently, for some reason they had a lot of trouble getting it with multiple USBs but this old USB I had worked perfectly first try.

    Hardware things to troubleshoot:

    • (For new builds) did you plug in the correct PSU cables, all the VGA/PCIe 6+2 pins for graphics and 8pin CPUs? If you don’t have all of them in you may run into more instability.
    • Does htop or system monitor or BIOS show all of the RAM installed? If some are missing you may need to clean and reseat it, or replace it if deemed defective.
    • NVMe or SATA III disk? Are both cables plugged in properly for SATA?
    • Activate the smoke bomb somewhere well-ventilated (by that I mean dust out your PC)

    Those types of things would be a good starting point.