I have been investigating this issue in detail overnight and it really is most perplexing.
At first I did a complete system revert to see if that unfucked my install and/or allowed me to use my keyboard and mouse to at least backup the qubes that I deemed more important. At first this line of investigation seemed promising, because the bios issues I was experiencing concurrently seemed to be working themselves out. Then all of a sudden I saw a screen I had not seen before in the bios; somehow the bios itself had become corrupted and upon seeing several recommendations to buy a new motherboard wondered if it was the early onset of this issue (perhaps when doing the hardware upgrade the day before) that had predicated the issue I was experiencing with my Qubes OS.
Fortunately I managed to recover from this issue, despite the lack of a dedicated reflash button on my motherboard (won’t overlook the need for one of those next time I buy one though). This BIOS led to several false flags as I tried a host of hdd permutations because initially when I reverted the bios to default settings I forgot that I needed to re-enable the 3 virtualization settings within my bios, one of which (IOMMU), to my great surprise, could only be located via the search function.
Eventually I began to wonder if it might be possible to reinstall a new version of Qubes on a seperate drive, and then bckup some of the necessary qubes from the non-functional install and port them across to the new. By now this non-working install would not boot into qubes at all, and despite trying the recovery software on my various qubes install usbs did not seem to be getting anywhere fast.
Yet my having deleted the windows install via the bios utility amost immediately it wouldnt stop flagging as a bootable system after every install. Eventually the installs on my drives began rustling in vast pages of error messages which to my untrained eye seemed to be implying the dom0 itself was no longer on the system. Clearly my efforts to troubleshoot the problem were exacerbating the unknwon issue I was trying to resolve, rather than fix them. Although I exported the journalctl logs, I could not get them to export to my attached pen drive, and wound up exporting them to the /boot folder as suggested by system in the terminal shell that was the only thing by now surviving from the original install.
Fixing on a new install/portage sgtrategy as seemingly the only thing left I could try I removed the original nvme to avoid any potential contamination from the subsequent re-install I planned to undertake. But first I chose to use a live install to attept to save the log files so they could be hosted here. But try as I might, the live install (Mint chip xfce) I believe could not locate the two log files I had previously saved in the /booth folder of the oribinal install. Even worse, the boot folder itseld no longer appeared to be there because the only one showing up in my searches was the pne attached to my live install.
If Ifelt a little disgruntled that two files I had been so careful to save were no longer where they were mere moments before, the lack of an entire boot directory promulgated a sudden sliver of fear into my belly. Had I been onfected with a vris? was somebody pentesting me? It seemed difficult to know what to do other than investigate further.
Despite this extra previously bifurcated windows install (by now wiped) being the only one now on my system at all, the issue remained as intractable as when first it manifested itself. Furthermore, it seemed to be haviing an effect on my ventory disks because all of a sudden gparted, itseld installed in memory began to throw a wobbler before susbequently refusing to boot at all.
By now it was nearly 6am and I had once again worked through a period of the early morning hours I have dubbed porn-o’clock. The family would soon be up and my opportunity to onanistically abuse myself had once again been dashed by this blasted issue. Time to bring out the big guns I thought reaching for some disk santising software that I tended to see as a nuclear optuion given it negated the ability to recover anything at all.
Yet even whatever it was affecting this hard drive simply laughed off the sanitising software with the system crashing shortly after the system had installed. As I rebooted it again I noticed that the configuration files were suddenly now missing or corrupted; I swear, I hald expected to see a Mossad flag rise up over my computer. nothing, it seems could fix this issue. And when I tried a final time I discovered that the boot drive of the ventoy disk had now been removed as well.
Despite this nvme only being 3 months old, I am beginning to think the only solution might be to rip it out and throw it away. Cant think of what else to do… not if I want to be sure of not missing porn-o’clock for a third nght running.
As I say, not sure this is really a qubes issue any more, but i simply leaving a book half-read or, for that matter, a story left half told. And as I say, the log files from journalctl are no longer where I had saved them earlier. But as I sit here reflecting on what happened with the various qubes installatrion usbs, installed drives, and live linux disties of other origins on other usb disks a single unifying thread looms large in my head. It is something to do with initramfs. That was something that seemed to be happening in everything i read a log for. What that means, however, is beyond my ken nor wit to interpret.