Hi there, I am unable to boot the XFCE live USB install disk. After a brief moment on the screen with three small square dots, I get a message “Unable to contact settings server / Could not connect: No such file or directory”. I just downloaded the iso image and wrote to the USB with the following command format: dd if=/path/to/image.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=4M status=progress conv=fs. This happens on UEFI/non-UEFI/proprietary drivers/open source drivers.. all combinations of.
The motherboard is ASUS E35M1-M. Cannot remember the CPU at the moment. The machine is also not connected to a network.. Maybe I need the internet for this install?
Not sure what I am doing wrong? I have looked at the other ‘cannot boot live disk’ comments but none were helpful. Any help would be appreciated, thanks. If there is no solution I will just install native arch on it.
Try using Ventoy - you can use the USB drive as normal storage as well as to boot from.
And you can easily verify the checksum of the ISO that ended up on the device.
It looks like the ISO was corrupted, either the download or on the way onto the USB drive.
Easier is to just use cp. sudo cp Manjaro.iso /dev/sdb (sdb being your USB drive)
Make sure the process finishes, the prompt comes back , before you disconnect the drive.
Thank you. The cp method did the same thing, so I did the ventoy method. I installed Ventoy to the drive with the correct options, but I don’t understand how I drag the ISO onto the USB. I don’t see the USB flash drive in the file manager or anything.
Well - did you check and verify the checksum of the downloaded input file at least?
Was it o.k.?
When Ventoy is installed to the drive, you may want to disconnect and then re-insert the device
for whatever file manager you use to pick up the change.
(it shouldn’t be needed, but that will force it)
Unfortunately Ventoy did the same thing. I’m going to try a different flash drive, but if the flash drive was having some sort of invisible write error I can’t see Ventoy working on it.
I would say that the matching checksum would make it irrelevant to download again.
That’s alright. I have base arch installed and this is more of a headless system anyway. I just thought it would be nice to have XFCE at least. Maybe I will get arch installed first and then install a window manager after the fact.
I would say it may be possible that what you downloaded has indeed some flaw
and therefore downloading something else - like the minimal edition instead of the “normal” full one - might make a difference.
But that’s just me.
If I was you:
Instead of Arch I’d just use EOS - unless you really want to learn how to configure literally almost everything yourself
and doing it from a base system where almost nothing is pre-configured and just needs to be adapted.
It can be fun and a good learning experience.
I come from Debian originally - around 1998
then Gentoo and LFS
then Arch - there was no EOS or the Antergos that was before that at that time
… now I’m almost back at Debian - using Mint at the moment …
Presuming the OP created the Ventoy USB with an exfat filesystem (as directed in the Ventoy guide) they will need to ensure their system can recognise exfat:
The OP may need to install the exfatprogs package.
pacman -Qi exfatprogs
sudo pacman -S exfatprogs
It might not already be installed if the OP had opted to download a minimal rather than full Manjao ISO, for example, which might not contain the package.
Another potential issue with a low-end ASUS board of that vintage (2010) is that it will very likely only have USB2 support – some USB drives bought today may not be as backward compatible as expected – a USB2.0–USB3.0 drive may be better suited than, say, USB3.1–USB3.2.
Like any person, I searched on “download manjaro”. I got to a page that gave me a manjaro image (there were no choices there). I did not spend extra time looking for different images because what I did already destroyed almost a day of my time. XFCE is for older machines, so I assumed the installer would work on older machines.
Admittedly I do not grasp MBR / UEFI differences as well as I should so I just try all the combinations. But I am not surprised that it doesn’t support EFI because it is pretty old. I was given directions to follow, and none of them had an MBR option. When I boot off the drive in the BIOS it does give me two lines for the flash drive, one with EFI and one without and both work. Would this not mean that it supports EFI?
If there is a way to do this that I can run through it once and it will be sure to work then I will do it, but I wasted almost a day on this and I have arch installed now with zfs and I just need nfs to make it functional again.
