So anyway, I got to googling and within short order found the following discussion on this here site:
Although my system wasn’t working before the latest problem, I hoped that the thread might help me find a solution all the same. However. As I skimmed through the thread not only did I notice that nothing the assistor was suggesting seemed to work but also I understood very little of it anyway. Although ultimately the OP gave up on solving the issue, the final post by someone else (12 months later) talked of having solved the issue by means of mounting a debian live iso and using that to somehow mount qubes.
Having decided on a plan of action I plugged my ventoy usb into the system only to realise I didnt have a vanilla iso of debian already saved. Quickly plugging another usb into the system I then formatted it only to realise that in my haste I had formatted ventoy disk rather the new disk. ‘You f*****g dipshit’ I thought before putting another item on my list of computer related issues to sort out once my lack of a daily driver was resolved.
I plugged in the debian live distro and had a brief fiddle but nothing stood out and I needed to go out anyway so i removed the usb stick and hit rshutdown as I began to dress. Looking over at the machine I saw that I must have hit restart by mistake because the qubes installation screen had just timed out on the standard ‘install qubes/no review’ option and the installer so began. I don’t know if any of you remember a movie series by the name of Poltergeist? Well there’s one scene in one of them in which the protagonist walks into a room where there are a couple of kids watching TV, before noticing that the telly isn’t plugged in. Well. In a moment paralleling that scene, as I watched the qubes installer chirp excitedly away I looked down on the desk only to realise that usb stick with the qubes install iso wasn’t even plugged in!!
‘Good thing I’m not as superstitious as I once was’ I remember thinking, but there was still a bit of a spooky flutter in my stomach to begin with. Nevertheless, the installer continued at a tremendous pace, right through the debian part of the installer and on into the fedora install as well. To emphasise, at this point there were no usb sticks plugged in at all. About half way through the whonix part of the installer however it began to freeze and so, more in hope than anything else, I plugged the usb stick with the qubes iso on it back in and to my surprise after a few moments the install progression bar began to proceed once again.
A few minutes later the configuration screen - a screen in the install process I have reached only once in the past few attempts - appeared. I felt a temptation to not tick the option for a usb-sys given it was my attempts to appease this requirement that had not only nuked my original working install but also (seemingly) the one previous time i had reached this point in the install process since. But i held my nerve and selected a usb qube and the box to allow my usb mouse to work alongside my shitty ps2 mini keyboard whose arrival in the post preempted this whole reinstall saga.
As I typed my user password in I held my breath telling myself not to get my hopes up and to my astonishment the dom0 desktop not only appeared but my mouse and keyboard appeared to be functioning normally too!