Initial setup doesn't finish correctly and doesn't reset to login screen

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1

Hi I am trying to install on an external USB drive connected to a laptop. The installation process goes fine. I reboot to do the initial setup. I keep the defaults, don’t change anything. Eventually after setting up the default templates, the setup gets to “Executing qubes configuration” and “Setting up networking” and then the screen abruptly goes blank, just a cursor (not blinking) in the upper left of the screen. I guess it’s supposed to show a login screen.

If I just hard reboot, I see a Qubes screen where the decrypt prompt is supposed to appear, but the field itself is missing. The progress bar is there. Eventually I get dumped to the emergency shell where I see the same messages as here: Dracut initqueue timeout on boot no dom0-root and swap. · Issue #5372 · QubesOS/qubes-issues · GitHub

At the moment I have reinstalled and not yet rebooted to the initial setup. I looked at some of the FAQ here: UEFI troubleshooting | Qubes OS
But none of the topics fit what I have observed exactly. Anyway most of the instructions there talk about editing /mnt/sysimage/boot/efi/EFI/qubes/xen.cfg but I don’t even have that file. I have a grub.cfg in that dir and a few .efi files but no xen.cfg.

Can anyone direct me here?

Also, if I install to an external USB drive, is the installation portable or is it configured for the hardware of the machine I installed with? ie can I plug the drive into another machine and boot it?

2

You should see 4 files there:

xen.cfg (empty, size 0)
  • Create xen.cfg with this content (adjust kernel version, and filesystem locations, below values are based on default installation of Qubes 3.2):
 [global]
 default=4.4.14-11.pvops.qubes.x86_64

 [4.4.14-11.pvops.qubes.x86_64]
 options=loglvl=all dom0_mem=min:1024M dom0_mem=max:4096M
 kernel=vmlinuz-4.4.14-11.pvops.qubes.x86_64 root=/dev/mapper/qubes_dom0-root rd.lvm.lv=qubes_dom0/root rd.lvm.lv=qubes_dom0/swap i915.preliminary_hw_support=1 rhgb quiet
 ramdisk=initramfs-4.4.14-11.pvops.qubes.x86_64.img

Did you try this?

3

Thanks, the solution turned out to be: Installation troubleshooting | Qubes OS (needed to disable sys-usb)

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