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.
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.