Boot from USB full image stuck at "GRUB" message

[Minoque]

Created USB stick by downloading the full ISO and using Gnome Disks to “Restore Disk Image”. No errors. Forum won’t let me post a screenshot of USB contents. Looks OK. Can supply file list.

Booted an old (Mint Linux) laptop with it, F7 brought up the boot menu and I chose the USB stick. Quickly got a black screen with the word “GRUB” top left. No further system activity, no disk activity. After 30 minutes I gave up.

Downloaded the basic ISO to a Ventoy USB stick, booted the same laptop from that and was able to run Endless from the stick. It couldn’t find files to install from Ventoy, would be very handy if it could but it’s OK for testing purposes.

It looks good. Was hoping to have a full (offline) installation for a demonstration though.

[Daniel]

Thanks for experimenting with Endless OS! Sounds like it is crashing somewhere very early during boot. It is curious that you have found another way to boot (suggesting that the kernel etc is probably fine).

As a first diagnosis step you could hit Escape repeatedly during boot and see if you get landed at the grub bootloader menu. This would tell us if the bootloader is the component that hangs or if it is something later.

If you are interested in a tedious workaround that would allow you to create a full offline installation:

1. Take another large capacity USB disk (not the one you created with Ventoy), format it with exfat or ext4 filesystem
2. Download the “Raw image” (not ISO) that you want to install and save it onto the USB disk. https://support.endlessos.org/en/installation/direct-download
3. Decompress that raw image on the USB disk.
4. Boot the device from the Ventoy USB disk that you previously created
5. Plug in the additional USB disk with the raw image
6. Use GNOME Disks “Restore Disk Image” to restore the raw image from the additional USB disk onto the laptop internal disk. (This will erase all data on the laptop internal disk)

[Minoque]

Thanks for the reply.

Several times I tried esc esc esc... as soon as it booted from the full ISO but nothing happened. Just the word “GRUB” on the screen.

Then, following your workaround, I downloaded eos-eos6.0-amd64-amd64.240611-152433.en.img.gz to an ext4 partition.

I can open it with (Mint Linux) Archive Manager but two attempts to extract have resulted in a generic error, no hints as to what the problem is exactly. 112GB free on partition. The content appears to be a single 22.4GB .img file.

edit: I’ll download it again and try to verify with sig file
edit again: Yep it was some sort of download glitch, has decompressed fine this time.

[Minoque]

The story so far…

1. Formatted 64GB USB as ext4

2. Downloaded fresh full raw image

25610403995 Jun 13 16:38 eos-eos6.0-amd64-amd64.240611-152433.en.img.gz
        833 Jun 13 15:44 eos-eos6.0-amd64-amd64.240611-152433.en.img.gz.asc

$ gpg --verify --keyring=./eos-image-keyring.gpg eos-eos6.0-amd64-amd64.240611-152433.en.img.gz.asc eos-eos6.0-amd64-amd64.240611-152433.en.img.gz
gpg: Signature made Tue 11 Jun 2024 17:43:24 BST
gpg:                using RSA key CB500F7BC9233FAD32B4E7209E0C1250587A279C
gpg: Good signature from "Endless Image Signer 1 (EIS1) <maintainers@endlessm.com>" [unknown]
gpg: WARNING: This key is not certified with a trusted signature!
gpg:          There is no indication that the signature belongs to the owner.
Primary key fingerprint: CB50 0F7B C923 3FAD 32B4  E720 9E0C 1250 587A 279C

3. Decompressed

45368678912 Jun 13 19:00 eos-eos6.0-amd64-amd64.240611-152433.en.img
        833 Jun 13 15:45 eos-eos6.0-amd64-amd64.240611-152433.en.img.asc

$ gpg --verify --keyring=./eos-image-keyring.gpg eos-eos6.0-amd64-amd64.240611-152433.en.img.asc eos-eos6.0-amd64-amd64.240611-152433.en.img
gpg: Signature made Tue 11 Jun 2024 17:37:39 BST
gpg:                using RSA key CB500F7BC9233FAD32B4E7209E0C1250587A279C
gpg: Good signature from "Endless Image Signer 1 (EIS1) <maintainers@endlessm.com>" [unknown]
gpg: WARNING: This key is not certified with a trusted signature!
gpg:          There is no indication that the signature belongs to the owner.
Primary key fingerprint: CB50 0F7B C923 3FAD 32B4  E720 9E0C 1250 587A 279C

4. Booted laptop into Mint Linux from the Ventoy USB stick
5. Plugged in the USB stick with the full raw image
6. Used Gnome Disks to “Restore Disk Image” from full raw img USB to the 500GB internal drive.

Disks threw an immediate error and “Restore Disk Image” halted at 0%. Sorry, I did not capture the message. Suspecting that perhaps there was a problem with the internal drive I then tried installing Linux Mint from the Ventoy USB stick and that worked perfectly. Apparently the hardware has no issues and now has a fully functioning Mint Linux OS.

In other news, I created a bootable USB stick with the base ISO and used it to install EOS on another laptop. It went smoothly.