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.
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I’ve heard the 24.04 installer is having issues. I would hold off for an update for them to patch other stuff as well
Did you do an integrity check on the downloaded iso before creating the boot media? I once had weird and unexplainable errors when trying to install debian and only after a stress overload I got the idea to check it and found out it was corrupted, so I downloaded again, checked again to confirm it was good that time, and proceeded normally.
I’ve tested the Beta of Ubuntu 24.04 and during the installation it bailed out as well which I’ve never seen before.
Normally the installation disk has Try and Install mode. If you go for the Try mode and then choose install you should be able to navigate to the log files and check the contents which can give you an idea of what went wrong.
There’s other flavors of Ubuntu, like Lubuntu, Xubuntu, Kubuntu, Edubuntu. Try one of them and see whether the same error happens. After you would successfully install for example Xubuntu you can use apt to install the
ubuntu-desktoppackage which is a meta package which will install the default GNOME of Ubuntu. Then proceed to remove the XFCE4 packages and you’re done.That looks like a software issue… I would try a different distro or a different version of Ubuntu (e.g. 22.04).
It’s a sign. Take the hint. \s
- try another live usb and or live distro. If that works, it’s your usb and or live distro
- did you log out and try again?
- if it’s a live usb, can you get to live mode?
- I tried a different USB with a fresh download and got the same error.
- I’ll try a different distro :+1:
- I’m not logged in when I get the error in the photo. That’s what ends up coming up as the live USB boots. It won’t even load into live mode. The only time I was able to get that working at all was with safe graphics mode but it failed to even start the install
I highly reccomend Kubuntu
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.
It’s just a buggy installer. I had a similar crash problem with an HP PC.
Looks like Gnome (the software that handles the GUI) died. The installer (which other people reported issues for) is still up and running, funnily enough.
If you have Nvidia hardware, this could be related to the Nvidia drivers being unstable; they could become more stable after installation of the proprietary ones once Ubuntu is on your main hard drive.
I doubt this is a motherboard issue. However, the drive and the GPU malfunctioning could be a sign of a faulty power supply (happened to me!). You could also check for software updates for your motherboard: I’ve seen similarly confusing errors when someone managed to boot their PC with a CPU that was officially only supported several motherboard updates later; updating the firmware fixed everything in that case.
If the PSU is fine and there are no updates, I would recommend checking Ubuntu 23.10 (if you think the problem will be solved within a few months) or 22.04 (if you think your problem will be solved within 8 years) instead.
Just use Mint!
