USB Won't Boot

[Member marlowe221]

Hi everyone,

I have a Gigabyte 990XFA-UDA Rev.3 motherboard and I’m running Windows 10 (I want to escape!). This motherboard is notorious for not getting along well with Linux. One of the major problems is loading up live USBs of a distro. So I’m not surprised when something doesn’t work. The problem is mainly with 64 bit distros; 32 bit versions tend to work better.

What did surprise me is that the MX Linux 64 bit live USB worked perfectly!

So I tried the AntiX one. And… nope. I can get it to work in failsafe mode, but that’s it.

My Secure Boot is off, etc. Any tips or ideas?

Edit – I should be more descriptive. The USB starts to work but then after a few seconds the screen goes black and I get the “no signal” message from my monitor. It never comes back from that. The only way out is the power button on the tower.

Update – The live USB boots if I choose failsafe mode or safe video mode. Once I’m in everything seems to work fine except that I am stuck at a much lower screen resolution than my monitor’s native one. Installing the Nvidia drivers doesn’t work either, but I don’t have persistence enabled so that might be why.

• This topic was modified 4 years, 11 months ago by marlowe221.
• This topic was modified 4 years, 11 months ago by marlowe221.

[Moderator BobC]

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I don’t know how to fix your problem, but would suggest you run
inxi -Fxz
from a terminal and post the results for starters.

A 2nd thing I would suggest is to go to the boot options when booting the USB and selecting the CHECKMD5 option to get it to check the USB for errors.

It sounds to me like the problem is graphics related.

One more suggestion, since it works in MX, bring it up in MX and run the inxi command there and post the output from MX as well so the people who know can compare the two.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 11 months ago by BobC.

[Moderator caprea]

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Besides what BobC mentioned above,

it is possible to install the nvidia-driver on a live-usb
you have to enable persistence during the boot, I think it’s the F5 key and you need a lot of space for the root persistence at least 1GB, I think.
Then on the live-session you can install the driver with the nvidia-installer from control-centre.
I didn’t look for the backports drivers, because the default 4.9.87-antix-kernel maybe doesn’t match to this.

This is from my live-usb

Graphics:
  Card-1: Intel Xeon E3-1200 v3/4th Gen Core Processor Integrated Graphics 
  driver: i915 v: kernel bus ID: 00:02.0 
  Card-2: NVIDIA GM206 [GeForce GTX 960] driver: nvidia v: 384.111 bus ID: 01:00.0 
  Display: server: X.Org 1.19.2 driver: nvidia resolution: 1920x1080~60Hz 
  OpenGL: renderer: GeForce GTX 960/PCIe/SSE2 v: 4.5.0 NVIDIA 384.111 
  direct render: Yes

Partition:
  ID-1: / size: 6.15 GiB used: 1.42 GiB (23.1%) fs: overlay dev: ERR-102 label: N/A 
  uuid: N/A 
  ID-2: /live/boot-dev size: 1.78 GiB used: 1.24 GiB (70.0%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/sdc1 
  label: antiX-Live-usb uuid: 91371e0d-62a6-4816-9abb-8c722aad7682 
  ID-3: /media/antiX-uefi size: 49.9 MiB used: 11.8 MiB (23.7%) fs: vfat 
  dev: /dev/sdc2 label: antiX-uefi uuid: C368-C7C7 

Boots fine with the nvidia-driver.
Maybe worth a try,

• This reply was modified 4 years, 11 months ago by caprea.

[Member marlowe221]

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Well, I got it to work. Basically, I took the GPU out and used my CPU’s onboard graphics and everything worked just fine that way. I’m typing this post from the AntiX live session now.

I’m sure I could reinstall the GPU and install the drivers after the system is installed.

Either way, it’s a pretty great distro, though I actually find myself very torn between this and MX. Good problem to have!

[Moderator BobC]

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Yes, my favorite, too.

It sounds like you are well on your way, but I’m wondering the exact sequence of events to switch the GPU back in and reboot with it. Will there be any problems booting at that point without the newer nvidia stuff. Maybe you will need to give it a boot cheat code for it to come up in failsafe graphics initially…

[Forum Admin dolphin_oracle]

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probably should update the kernel before trying the GPU again. IIRC, the default antiX kernel is slightly earlier version-wise from the kernel mx17.1 ships with. however, the newer kernels are availabe, and you can even change the kernel while running live. I’ve got a video on that on my channel.

[Member marlowe221]

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dolphin_oracle wrote:

probably should update the kernel before trying the GPU again. IIRC, the default antiX kernel is slightly earlier version-wise from the kernel mx17.1 ships with. however, the newer kernels are availabe, and you can even change the kernel while running live. I’ve got a video on that on my channel.

Thanks! I’ll look into that.

Then again, AntiX worked like a charm on my laptop…. I could install it there and leave the desktop free for MX… 🙂

[Moderator caprea]

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Sounds like a good plan !

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