Qubes OS Lock-Out After Recent Changes & Network Issues – Need Help!

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Hi everyone,

I was really hoping to avoid this and create an account on my new network and device
with a positive start and message on the forum.

However, I’m experiencing a very odd and frustrating issue with my Qubes OS system on a new machine. For brevity, I’ve quickly outlined the sequence of events leading up to my current state:

  1. Decided to wait with updating the bios until I have a secure connection since vendor wants
    me to send all my info over an unencrypted connection on a potentially hostile network.
  2. The new machine connected to the internet for the first time via Anon-Whonix.
  3. Setup separate usb qubes for keyboard and regular usb
  4. The VPN wasn’t working for some reason—even though the setup is correct (it works fine on other Qubes OS devices with exact same setup).
    6.Changed system icons and fonts in dom0 (system) and in app vm’s
  5. I disabled Bluetooth, geo-clue-demo (in my Fedora XFCE 41 template), and sound.
  6. Suddenly, pavucontrol started running on its own, consuming 41% CPU. (Note: The device doesn’t have speakers, only a mic, which was disabled in the GUI.)
  7. The device appeared to only connect to the TOR network; I couldn’t reach the clearweb—this was already occurring before I altered the template.
  8. I set up the VPN another time and tested everything—no improvement; connection issues with the VPN and accessing the clearweb persist.
  9. I performed a dom0 update.
  10. I tested connectivity in an AppVM (by pinging Cloudflare) and found no network connection, confirming that only TOR is working.
  11. Warning from TOR about guard alef.
  12. The machine started shutting itself down randomly.
  13. Logged into bios saw watchdog was not running and switched it on.
  14. After logging back in, I noticed a change in the journalctl -b logs; the BIOS version changed from 2.7 to 3.3, and a firmware bug was reported—the machine even shut down again.
  15. After several self shutdowns, I logged in and received an error regarding an LVM thin pool transaction ID is different then expected, and Firewalls and App vm’s failed to start.
  16. Turned watchdog off again.
  17. After a restart, I now can’t even access my keyboard to type my password.
  • I have multiple machines running Qubes OS, and this is the first time I’ve encountered something like this. Pretty sure I screwed up somewhere along the line. Both the machine and network are new. Is it still possible to salvage some data?

And has anyone encountered similar issues or have any suggestions on where to start troubleshooting? Any help, including diagnosing the firmware bug or managing the LVM thin pool error, would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance for your time and assistance.

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Hi Onion,

Starting at the end of your post…

If you have the keyboard on a dedicated sys-usb, then maybe it is not starting. You could try adding ‘qubes.skip_autostart’ on the grub command line. Maybe it is necessary to remove items for usb hiding, but you must know about that if you set up multiple sys-usb. Then, it should be possible to use KB attached to dom0.

After that, make backup of any important data, because unexpected shutdowns and unexpected bios version changes are sounding like weird hardware problems, bad PSU, CMOS battery, or other strangeness.

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Thank you for your kind response. I probably misconfigured something while experimenting with Qubes and temporarily switched to another SSD (which resulted in getting locked out of sys-usb on the new install, but I managed to fix that). Everything is working fine now. I was mistaken about the BIOS change, but I agree that the hardware seems unstable.

I also figured out the odd Tor behavior: my router firewall was set to block both incoming and outgoing traffic, yet Anon-Whonix was completely bypassing that configuration, which is pretty cool :slight_smile:

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