Greetings to all,
I’m helping a friend try and do a bit of forensics on a system crash they had about a month ago.
Oddly, I can’t seem any Fedora LiveUSB to even be recognised as bootable medium by this machine, or my own
I’ve tried a few different USBs, both F36 and F37 images (checksums all verified) and several flashing utilities (Fedora media writer, rufus, dd) with no luck. I thought at first it may be the laptops USB ports, bu when I sanity checked with my own desktop test rig (an ancient PBH-77M) and laptop (Dell XPS 9560), I saw exactly the same behaviour.
I can’t get any permutation or combination of images, usbs and flash tools to boot register as bootable in the BIOS on any machine I have access to, regardless of any UEFI/legacy settings I can think to change. The drives register, but selecting simply goes nowhere, as if trying to boot from an empty disk.
The same USBs, flashed with the same utilities, can boot an Ubuntu image on my hardware no problems. These also boot on the crashed laptop, but seem to hang/fail at the first splash screen (for other display related reasons, I’m fairly sure).
But in any case, it clearly seems to be an issue with the Fedora images. I personally installed F35 with the same methods not long ago, and dont recall needing to do anything too arcane? So I can only conclude something’s happened with recent Fedora images to make them problematic with certain (older?) hardware platforms. A short scan of reddit seems to indicate I’m not alone, either.
I’ve since pulled the SSD from the crashed machine and will recover data that way, but I was wondering if anyone else has seen this behaviour, and if there’s a known fix? I sure cant find it and don’t even know where to start troubleshooting.
Cheers
Tyler