USB Installation Media Error

User Support
1

Hello everyone, being desperate, I really count on your help.
Having mounted a new desktop PC specifically to install Qubes OS because my old one was unable to do so (because of the processor…), you can imagine my frustration… First of all, I followed the installation guide in the Qubes OS documentation and enabled AMD SVM and IOMMU for virtualization in my UEFI Bios. Then, to proceed to the installation, I write the iso image of Qubes OS 4.1.1 on a 8Gb USB key. I plug my USB key on the motherboard and start the computer on the USB key. GRUB starts, I select directly install Qubes OS in verbose mode in its menu. Qubes OS starts to boot and an error message appears, then the display freezes. So, as you can see, in the current state, I did not succeed in installing Qubes OS…

Before writing the error message, here is what I did to solve it:

  • try the previous version 4.0.4 of Qubes OS (IMPORTANT: this version doesn’t work either!)
  • try other Linux distributions (NB: They all worked fine.)
  • check the integrity of the iso image.
  • try other USB keys.
  • write the iso image with Rufus, GNOME disks or even with dd.
  • try several USB ports on my motherboard.
  • try to configure the UEFI Bios properly.
  • look for solutions on the internet.

Here is the error obtained with Qubes OS 4.1.1:

dracut-pre-udev[715]: modprobe: ERROR: could not insert ‘floppy’: No such device

On various other attempts, the message number varies a little but the message remains the same. That is, instead of [715], I get [716] or [717]. For exemple :

dracut-pre-udev[717]: modprobe: ERROR: could not insert ‘floppy’: No such device

Hoping that you will be able to help me. Thank you for reading!

2

Did you ever fix this?

3

The “no floppy” isn’t the issue.

I get this error on all my systems, I think it’s a Linux legacy warning that the system hasn’t detected a floppy drive.

4

Thanks for being the first ever to explain this “error”. I was always too lazy to write about it. How come it didn’t even occurred to people that this message is so normal/expected?

5

It’s a little counterintuitive when it’s the only error displayed on the screen.

It’s not just Qubes/Fedora, I’ve noticed it multiple times installing Linux both bare-metal and on hypervisors. I don’t know why it’s displayed, I always assumed it’s because boot from floppy is somehow enabled in the bios, and the message if just Linux unable to detect the floppy that the bios is telling it exists.

I could be completely wrong, and it might be something else, but I’m pretty sure you don’t need to worry about the warning unless you are actually trying to boot from floppy.

6

Probably when something has 30 million lines of code, you don’t even know what all unnecessary can be found there… But who can confirm that there aren’t any servers somewhere actively deployed with floppies, when there still are distros fitting diskettes…