F40 Workstation Live usb hangs on boot

Ask Fedora
1

The same USB stick worked on some older desktop. On a more recent laptop it hangs during boot at systemd-vconsole-setup.service.

2

In the emergency shell, I can’t find the mounted root, there’s no /dev/disk/by-label/ folder to find the root folder that it seems to complain about too.

3

I observed similar/same behavior on a F40 installation I updated.

Try to download newest ISO of F40 on Index of /pub/alt/live-respins-archive/40

This are updated spins since the release date, just in case you have an older ISO.

p.s.
I not could solve it yet on my side. However it is a external usb ssd disk I do my tests on it.

4

Well, thank you, I didn’t even know what respins were.

So, you think the problem could be an older ISO? By “older” I mean the official F40 Workstation release ISO.

5

If you use a re-spin, you will have the newer kernel integrated. This means, if you had problems with the older kernel it might work. But you really have to test it.

6

Well, the only way I was able to get it working is by burning the F40 Workstation Live iso to a DVD+RW and booting from that.

I am pretty sure the issue is the USB3 controller on this laptop is broken because I’m seeing xhci errors on boot, which means booting from a Live USB that enables xhci (which is most of them) will never work in this situation. Live USBs worked fine on this laptop before until USB port started malfunctioning.

I know USB2 is working because I do get to boot from a USB up until initramfs tries to init xhci and errors out. So, naturally, I will try to regenerate initramfs with dracut with no xhci modules and blacklist xhci on the installation to see if that fixes my USB.

Notably, my USB3 controller on another laptop was giving me so many issues that I just keep it off in BIOS, and I never had this problem on that laptop. This laptop, however, doesn’t have the option to turn off USB3 controller, so here we are.

I hope this helps someone in the same boat.

7

And as a follow-up, I was right. Turning off xhci in dracut fixed the USB ports. So I guess only custom Live USBs will boot on that laptop.