Elementary OS Luna does not boot to installation from USB and CD

[lagre]

I am trying to boot elementaryos-stable-amd64.20130810.iso from a USB stick, I put it there with unetbootin and I am able to get the Unetbootin screen up where it says "Try Elementary OS" etc. If I choose any of these, I simply get a black screen. Editing the boot to remove the "quiet" boot, I get some more information. Initially, the boot sequence stopped mentioning something about DVD-ROM. I unplugged my DVD ROM and tried again, this time it hung with this as its last message:

[sdd] Assuming drive cache: write through

(Photo attached)

Out of curiosity I decided to try and boot Ubuntu 12.04.2 (LTS) from the exact same USB stick using the same procedure with unetbootin, with no changes whatsoever in hardware (DVD ROM was still unplugged). Ubuntu boots just fine.

I was looking forward to trying Elementary OS, but I have to say I'm a bit disappointed that a version marked as "stable" does not even boot.

[lagre (lagre)]

As the stop seemed related to sdd (which is one of my disks), I tried disconnecting that disk as well as sda which was another large storage disk, only to leave my SSD. It then stops with the following message instead:

[drm] Initialized drm 1.1.0 20060810

Picture attached.

Any idea what is causing this? I also tried editing the Grub entry, removing "quiet nosplash" and replacing it with only "recovery", even this didn't let me boot.

[lagre (lagre)]

This is just a guess but I think this might be related to nvidia drivers. I had similar issues with Xubuntu 13.04 and I finally managed to resolve them by booting in recovery and installing nvidia-current. The last error message seems to support this as drm seems to stand for Direct Rendering Manager.

[Tristam (th3-dark-l0rd-0f-linux)]

The same exact thing happened to me! It must be a bug in the 64bit "stable" version...

[Tristam (th3-dark-l0rd-0f-linux)]

I made some footage using my smartphone in both "install" and "try live cd" modes. I hope this helps.

[Tristam (th3-dark-l0rd-0f-linux)]

UPDATE: ISO works just fine on virtual hardware.

[Rawiri Blundell (rawiri-blundell)]

Ticket bump.

I'll echo/confirm lagre: This seems to be common with a range of nvidia GPU's. I've had it with the GT610, 210 and an old AGP Quadro across Ubuntu, Mint and ElementaryOS. The workaround for this is to edit the boot options, adding nomodeset e.g. "quiet splash --" becomes "nomodeset quiet splash --" or simply "nomodeset nosplash --"

This should get you up and working, the problem is once the install is complete, Xorg isn't guaranteed to figure it all out by itself upon reboot. For example, last night I installed ElementaryOS on a box with a GT610 using the nomodeset trick, and it rebooted to a garbled screen. I switched to another tty, which was also garbled, but at least interactive. I logged in, carefully typed `sudo nvidia-xconfig`, pressed Enter, then `sudo reboot` and everything was fine.

I'm not 100% sure how to make that a more straightforward fix, at the very least, nomodeset could be a "safe mode" (or possibly "nvidia safe mode") boot option. Beyond that, thinking out loud: perhaps there could be a detection for having booted with nomodeset (e.g. dmesg | grep BOOT_IMAGE), or specifically detecting certain nvidia GPU's, and if possible, chroot the HDD and run nvidia-xconfig before finally doing the post-install reboot.

[Miguel Garcia (miguel-l5862u)]

I am having the same issue but my pc does not have any nvidia card it is just an intel atom d525 integrated graphics and lightdm works fine but after entering credentials there is just a black screen and all i can see is the mouse cursor and there is nothing else by changing to nomodeset am able to access to my desktop but the performance is incredibly bad everything is being rendered directly from software and i only have the option of 1204x768 resolution i already tried different options but still no luck is somebody else having this issue?

[Miguel Pelaez (miguel2706)]

I have the same issue in elementaryos-freya-amd64.20150411, trying to install from my USB. I have a NVIDIA G72 [GeForce 7200 GS / 7300 SE]