Qubes, with Xen Hypervisor Boot Issue - Black Screen

Brex · March 28, 2025, 8:49pm

Hello, I recently installed Qubes OS but whenever I select “Qubes, with Xen hypervisor” in GRUB it does:
Loading Xen…
Loading Linux…
Loading initial ramdisk…
0x0000… bytes at- cuts off and goes to a black screen. I think it crashes/freezes. Anyone know how to fix this? New to linux so sorry if question is a bit unclear/is missing information.

Using Qubes OS version: 4.2.4

Hardware: Acer Aspire 3 (A315-24P)

otter2 · March 28, 2025, 10:01pm

Do you have access to other virtual terminals with ctrl+alt+f[2-6] after booting to black screen?

Maybe you could troubleshoot from there. Otherwise you could try using serial port for troubleshooting…

Also try connecting a monitor. This is completely out of pocket but what if will display image there for whatever reason.

Brex · March 28, 2025, 11:47pm

No

My laptop and monitor don’t have serial ports

Tried with an HDMI cable but my monitor said “HDMI NO INPUT”

I appreciate your help. I am new to linux so troubleshooting this is difficult for me… Also, I added more information to my initial post

otter2 · March 29, 2025, 6:38am

Usb is a serial port, you should be able to use it:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/serial-console.html

Of course, this is for generic linux, qubes’ dom0 is under xen, so you could try debugging xen too:

Getting a serial console on USB-only Qubes laptop - this one seem to contain a good take on getting dom0 serial, but it requires a working system. It also contains information on getting xen console
Is there a Serial Port Xen/Dom0 Debugging Tutorial? - this one focuses on xen console and only requires boot parameters, so can be used with grub access only

It also may cut your screen off to try and show a pretty image, there is a way to disable that to allow linux to display boot messages on screen, like this: