Black screen after xen relinquishing control i9-10900K, log file?

User Support Hardware Issues
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I love Qubes and have installed it on three machines – a x220 lenovo (ver 3), a 6700K Skylake computer (custom) with 64gb (ver 4 and 4.0.4) with Intel integrated graphics, a i9-7980XE 18 core with 64gb (ver 4.0.4) with Nvidia graphics.

I tried and failed to install Qubes on two Dell XPS-13 laptops.

More importantly, I have a new i9-10900K 10 core processor machine that I just built with 128gb of memory and Intel integrated graphics, and I am not having much joy in a Qubes installation. Lubuntu works fine.

I have tried 4.0.4, two alphas from July 03 2021 and a 4.1 beta from July 11 2021. I always hit the black screen after Xen relinquishes control. I tried editing the troubleshooting option in grub with /noexitboot and /mapbs. Looking at the video of the output the 4.0.4 version clearly has some issues with the hardware. I can’t really judge the 4.1 beta as well.

My question – Is a log file for the installer that I can inspect? I have taken a video of the screen, but this is awkward and harder to share.

By the way, this is first time that I have asked for help on a computer topic since I built my original IBM PC (bought the base model with 16k ram, no floppies and added 48k ram and 2 floppies. It cost around $5k with NEC green monitor and dot matrix printer – if I had invested it in the S&P500 I would have 358K USD today).

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have you try with legacy installation ?

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Not sure, but maybe this can help:

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While I don’t have a clue as to what might be the problem, I’d try to disable or tweak some specific CPU-related settings in the BIOS in case there is some kind of incompatibility related to one of those settings/features? Like hyperthreading and similar stuff.

i9-10900K 10 core processor machine that I just built with 128gb of memory

I envy you. I’m regularly at 60 out of 64 GB RAM and want to upgrade to 128, but my motherboard doesn’t support it.

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Thanks truly appreciate the replies and I also appreciate all the work that has been done by various people contributing to Qubes.

With regard to some specific comments:

I wish I had the legacy option available in the bios. 2 of the 3 machines that I can’t get qubes installed on do not permit legacy bios.

I have disabled and enabled almost all the pertinent options in the bios. I disabled hyperthreading (I do that for every system anyway), enabled the virtualization options, disabled/enabled network, disabled thunderbolt, serial ports, etc. To get it to boot with 128gb I had to disable some of the speed options. I also tried different thumb drives, used dd and etcher, put the iso on an internal clean hard drive (samsung evo 360). I almost always put new partition tables and file systems on the thumb drives before use (I also tried FAT 32 and ext4 systems).

In terms of memory, I usually try to install the maximum amount I can. Memory is so cheap these days (based on the perspective of paying $270 in 1981 dollars for 48K of ram). Having said that, I had trouble getting it to boot with 128G – 64G was a breeze. Ideally, I stuff a box with RAM and have the option of upgrading a processor in a couple of years. On the two 64GB systems I haven’t hit memory problems in Qubes. I researve Qubes for email, web browsing, and dealing with potentially unclean files people send me with MS products and pdfs (love the pdf converter). I hit memory problems in mathematical work which I usually do in Lubuntu. The box for the new machine had my old, dearly departed, dual opteron setup with 16GB ram from 2006. I remember paying a substantial amount for the 8 sticks of 2GB memory. We live in a wonderful time (at least in terms of computers). I also put together three 8gb raspberry PIs in the last month – $100 for a 8GB machine!

Getting back to the main message, I am flying blind on this installation since it fails before getting to the main Qubes installer. I took a video of the verbose output, but it is 65mb and I haven’t tried to attach that here.

A possible line of concern:

Unrecognized CPU model 0xa5 – assuming vulnerable to lazyFPU

However, it did recognize 10 cores, the frequency, and other items.

This gets back to my original question. Is there a good way to obtain the log associated with this procedure when the installer fails to get to the install? My video is 65mb. Individual snapshots often miss parts of the screen. I tried my HDMI capture dongle but it seemed to have troubles. It would be much simpler if there was a text log that a more expert Qubes person could quiickly assess.

Thanks again!