I have been using Qubes for quite some time on my laptop, and upgraded to 4.2.x some time - so my hardware used to work together with Qubes 4.2.x
At some point after the laptop run out of battery, I could not boot the system anymore. It tried to start “lightdm.service”, but then froze completely.
Since then, I tried to re-install Qubes OS 4.2.1, but have not managed to do so:
In 90% of tries, the system freezes
In 5% of cases, I was able to install Qubes up to the point, when the system restarts. But after re-start, the system froze again.
In 5% of cases, I was able to fully install Qubes, but after the first re-boot I was back at the problem that lightdm.service would not start.
I am not abel to explain this random behaviour, but I also do not know how to debug as the system freezes and I cannot access log files.
The problem seems to be related to:
This is another problem, but it may be related:
Potentially even this one:
I do have an NVIDIA Graphics card and my guess is that this seems to mess the system up.
Unfortunately I do not understand the solutions proposed in the posts above. Seems that “hide the GPU” seems to be promising, but I do not know how to use this (1) during installation process or (2) with the new installed system in dom0
Thank you for taking the time.
I did my best to try this out, yet given the fact that I am not an expert in bootloaders let me explain in detail what I did:
I copied the image of Qubes OS on (several) usb data sticks
I booted with these data sticks
When the first screen shows up with the options “install”, “test & install”, “rescue” etc. I pressed “e”
A screen came up with 4 lines, the second started with “multiboot2 …”; I added the above test after the last character of this line [“cpufreq=xen:hwp=off”]
Then I pressed F10 for reboot
The system started up, did some tests, yet at the end it froze again.
The only meaningful warning that I could see on the screen was:
“dracut-initqueue: Unknown device “/dev/run/install/repo/images/install.img”: No such device”
In case I got this completely wrong please advise. I have to admit that I did not fully understand the two articles you posted above - it looks like these were on Qubes systems that worked in general, while I do not have a working system anymore and I work with the USB data stick with the image for installation.
question 1: Yes, I had the original line, then exactly one space, then the string “cpufreq=xen:hwp=off”, and I tried this twice: 1x with a trailing space at the end, the second time without a trailing space. I pressed F10 to reboot.
question 2: The frozen screen appears after a clear screen, that is the screen is entirely blank, and on the top left corner you see the cursor stale (that is: not blinking).
I tried as you said:
1.) I run the Qubes OS installer with the “additional” boot options.
It worked and I could install Qubes OS - but I think it has nothing to do with these parameters, it was the case before that it sometimes worked and sometimes it did not.
2.) With a brand new Qubes OS 4.2.1 installed, I could boot once without any problem. But when I shut it down, I had the problem as always: The boot process halted at “lightdm.service”
3) I then tried to reboot with the additional parameters as suggested above.
The boot process was a lot longer, way more information, but it does not make any sense to me. I tried to take a picture of the very last screen when the system halted (see attached).
