[Bug 1557894] Re: Strange usb device format and failure to boot on UEFI system

[Brian Burch]

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The internet is littered with dead-ends, bad advice and out-of-date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.squashfs. No
wonder it gave up!

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?)

-- 
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu
Foundations Bugs, which is subscribed to usb-creator in Ubuntu.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1557894

Title:
  Strange usb device format and failure to boot on UEFI system

Status in usb-creator package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  I want to run 16.04 on a new ASUS T300 Chi transformer notebook, which
  is pre-installed with windows 10.

  I started by making a DVD iso from the beta distribution, then booted
  and installed it on a spare partition of my old Dell 1558 Studio
  laptop. The system runs fine in 64-bit mode, but the BIOS is non-EFI.
  I then applied the latest updates to the Dell HDD 16.04 system before
  running usb-creator. I've done this several times, always starting by
  DD-ing zeros over the first 200MB of the target 8mb usb stick.

  The creator reports successful completion, but gparted doesn't like
  the contents of the usb stick after the image has been created. The
  partition table has been changed from type=msdos to type=mac, and the
  sector size from 512 to 2048. The capacity changed from 7.7GB to 57GB!
  There are two partitions: sdb1 is called "Ubuntu Gnome 16.04 LTS, with
  an "unknown" file system type and a size of ONLY 4KB; 1.22GB
  unallocated; sdb2 is fat16 and its 2.31 MB extent is almost full. No
  flags are set on either partition. Whenever I interact with gparted it
  throws a pop-up that says "The driver descriptor says the physical
  blocksize is 2048, but linux says it is 512 - cancel or ignore".

  I am amazed to report this image boots successfully on my Dell with
  its "legacy" BIOS. The ubuntu live/install options page displays and
  it eventually boots the live system, which superficially seems to run
  OK.

  The ASUS uses American Megatrends UEFI BIOS, which I have updated to
  the latest version 207. I have enabled the CSM (Compatibility Support
  Module - legacy BIOS) and disabled both fast start and secure boot. It
  boots the usb stick in non-EFI mode as desired (proved by not getting
  the grub2 efi menu). The "man=keyboard" splash panel appears, then it
  drops to a tty login briefly before the new ubuntu "circling logo"
  appears. After several minutes, it drops back to a tty screen with the
  following:

   (initramfs) Unable to find a medium containing a live system.

  I also have a usb stick with knoppix 7.0 which successfully boots in
  64-bit non-efi mode on both the Dell and the Asus, so I am reluctant
  to blame the Asus legacy bios at this stage. Why is gparted reporting
  such a strange format after creating the usb image?

  ProblemType: Bug
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 16.04
  Package: usb-creator-gtk 0.3.2
  ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.4.0-13.29-generic 4.4.5
  Uname: Linux 4.4.0-13-generic x86_64
  ApportVersion: 2.20-0ubuntu3
  Architecture: amd64
  CurrentDesktop: GNOME
  Date: Wed Mar 16 16:11:25 2016
  InstallationDate: Installed on 2016-03-14 (2 days ago)
  InstallationMedia: Ubuntu-GNOME 16.04 LTS "Xenial Xerus" - Alpha amd64 (20160225.1)
  SourcePackage: usb-creator
  UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

To manage notifications about this bug go to:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/usb-creator/+bug/1557894/+subscriptions