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0f7b58d
(Get the code!)
This has proved to be a very frustrating bug and I worry that less knowledgeable and persistent users will encounter the same situation and give ubuntu a bad name. After all, EFI is here to stay and we all want ubuntu to used more widely with each new release. 16.04 is to be the next LTS and my short experience with both betas has convinced me that it is a huge improvement over 14.04.
The good news it that I have installed 16.04 beta2 on the Asus T300 chi transformer notebook. I will write more about this later. The bad news is that I found it impossible to install directly from a usb.
The internet is littered with dead-ends, bad advice and out-of-date instructions when dealing with the initramfs message "unable to find a medium containing a live file system"... and not just for ubuntu.
In my case (and perhaps many others), I found the message was issued by the script casper, when ${livefs_root} has not been set by the function mountroot(). This function calls find_livefs(), which is also in the casper script. I even tried setting the casper kernel boot parameter ignore_uuid in grub.cfg, but the message was still generated. I then deleted the quiet boot option and changed splash to nosplash. Now I could see the console log as it was generated.
My problem determination was made much more difficult by the fact that busybox would not read from my keyboard (PS/2 into a USB dongle). Eventually, I tried popping the keyboard dongle out and back into the USB hub port - the log showed the device was recognised and then I could enter commands to see what was going on!
Most importantly, the ubuntu live iso usb device was NOT mounted at the time casper had given up looking for the live filesystem.
I spent a long time messing around - trying different manufacturers usb sticks, manually mounting the device on /cdrom, pre-unsquashing the live system, and even trying to satisfy the unsquashed symlinks for /initrd.img and /vmlinuz. Nothing worked because I was unable to find a way to resume initialisation of the final stage of the bootstrap process. (Perhaps someone more knowledgeable could tell me?)