Trying to boot Fedora 40 USB only results in running hard disk's grub and boot options

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1

I have an old HP SFF 8100 computer running kubuntu (with btrfs subvolumes) and Fedora 38, dual boot option going nicely (was a huge effort to make that happen) but now I want to update to Fedora 40. Due to one partition’s small size I want to repartition during install, so I tried booting from a USB memory stick with Fedora 40. That does not work…

Choosing to boot from the USB stick, It seems to very briefly show one version of grub starting to run but immediately switches to the version of grub from the hard disk, giving only its two operating systems. How do I get the f40 installer to run?

  • It can boot an old Ubuntu 22 USB installer.
  • I have tried two different memory sticks (one had that Ubuntu that booted)
  • I have tried both Fedora 40 workstation and server;
  • I have tried mediawriter and dd to write to the USB (I can always mount the stick and see the files)
  • I see a comment to a possibly related question: “Rename grubx64.efi and grubia32.efi to BOOTX64.EFI and BOOTIA32.EFI respectively”, which I cannot do because the filesystem is readonly.

When I installed Fedora 38 from DVD I had to go to a lot of effort to keep the kubuntu installation (Fedora wasn’t the first distro I tried to add - most don’t understand there could be an operating system already installed and happily suggest reformatting! Fedora 38 had been the best I had tried, but the installation process could be better). Just possibly my present problem comes from that mucking around I had to do to keep Kubuntu, but I doubt it. I suspect it has something to do with grub, or maybe the old HP hardware and the USB’s format - yet the working Ubuntu one had very similar structures, for what its worth:

Disk /dev/sde: 14.59 GiB, 15669919744 bytes, 30605312 sectors
Disk model: SanDisk 3.2Gen1
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: A9694891-AA3F-477B-AB3B-77EFBBB2B778

Device Start End Sectors Size Type
/dev/sde1 64 7943767 7943704 3.8G Microsoft basic data
/dev/sde2 7943768 7952271 8504 4.2M EFI System
/dev/sde3 7952272 7952871 600 300K Microsoft basic data
/dev/sde4 7954432 30603263 22648832 10.8G Linux filesystem

Do I need to make a DVD somehow? Is that the only solution?

2

Just a general observation.
The disk info you provided does not seem to be the drive you are installing to but instead to be only a 16GB Sandisk that probably would not be large enough to install fedora. Information about a drive that is not part of the problem is irelevant to this question.

Please instead boot the already installed fedora OS then post the output of
sudo fdisk -l and lsblk -f so we can see the full details of the system drives.

Also explain how you wish to change the partitioning.

The simplest fix would be to adjust the partitions then simply upgrade your f38 system to f40. Of course, if you wish a clean install then adjusting partitions before doing the install would still be the approach I would use, with a manual install to overwrite the existing data for the OS.

3

Sorry, I should have been clearer… the disk info was of a bootable install USB stick for a different distro; I was trying to say “the Fedora USB installer (which you probably are very familiar with, so I won’t bother to show it) seems very similar to this one that works, so how come it doesn’t?”.

I have managed to get Fedora 40 installed now (by adjusting those partitions manually as suggested, which required deleting f38 and all the configuring I had done to files like /etc/hosts, /etc/samba/smb.conf and so on. I did save those files for safety, and my setup meant /home and /usr/local didn’t get damaged in the process, but there were quite a few files I didn’t like to simply copy back after installing f40, but merge my changes into the new system-supplied ones manual editing. Quite possibly I could have avoided some work if I could have upgraded from f38 to f40 without trashing the partition with / and /etc, but that isn’t too important. What is still an oddity is:

I still could not boot the f40 USB installer on this HP 8100; I had to make a DVD (from exactly the same thing!) and it worked. That installer boots perfectly well on (for example) an old Acer 5920 laptop (which is a bit more fussy than your average computer), and several other distro’s USB installers boot properly on the HP, plus the f40 installer can be opened and all the files seem okay when I’m running any linux on the computer.

It seems the memory stick acts like it isn’t bootable on that computer (and only that computer) and the BIOS sulks and falls back to booting from the hard disk (or - is it possible? - the grub configuration on the f40 installer somehow gets it into its head to chain to the hard disk’s boot sector?!?).

Since it failed to work at any of the stages of repartitioning of the hard disk (I had sda2 with a small swap area, and sda4 with f38 other than /home, /var and /usr/local), I don’t think the hard disk’s setup contributes to the failure to boot the f40 installer, and the problems I had when installing f38 when kubuntu was already there seem to have disappeared when I installed f40. But, just in case it is important, here’s the output of sudo fdisk -l and lsblk -f (and yes, it might be odd having a small unused linux raid partition at the start of sda):

root@smallfry:/Garage/Temp# fdisk -l /dev/sda
Disk /dev/sda: 931.51 GiB, 1000203804160 bytes, 1953523055 sectors
Disk model: WDC WD10EZEX-75Z
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x0003120f

Device     Boot    Start        End    Sectors   Size Id Type
/dev/sda1           2048    2099199    2097152     1G fd Linux raid autodetect
/dev/sda3  *    17723392 1953521663 1935798272 923.1G 83 Linux
**root@smallfry:/Garage/Temp# lsblk -f**
NAME      FSTYPE            FSVER            LABEL                  UUID                                 FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINTS
sda                                                                                                                     
├─sda1    linux_raid_member 0.90.0                                  fa027e75-d301-7091-e368-bf24bd0fce41                
│ └─md127                                                                                                               
└─sda3    btrfs                              kubuntu_2404           679dc30f-e935-4d01-8cfb-1fb567f8a780  469.8G    49% /home
                                                                                                                        /usr/local
                                                                                                                        /Other/kubuntu
                                                                                                                        /swap
                                                                                                                        /
sdb                                                                                                                     
└─sdb1    btrfs                              Garage                 172c147e-0d87-446b-aee7-aff6db5b3e1a  842.4G    70% /Garage
sdc                                                                                                                     
└─sdc1    ntfs                               Backups_SE             90D475D0D475B8D4                      661.4G    64% /Garage/Backups/Older
sdd                                                                                                                     
├─sdd1    vfat              FAT32            EFI                    67E3-17ED                                           
├─sdd2    ext4              1.0              ServerMirror           555180cd-e0d1-4a8b-a18b-21643be5b122   65.9G    89% /Garage/Served
└─sdd3    exfat             1.0              ArchiveArea            664C-2FD1                             138.9G    95% /Garage/ArchiveArea
sde       iso9660           Joliet Extension Fedora-WS-Live-40-1-14 2024-04-14-23-09-56-00                              
├─sde1    iso9660           Joliet Extension Fedora-WS-Live-40-1-14 2024-04-14-23-09-56-00                     0   100% /run/media/mark/Fedora-WS-Live-40-1-14
├─sde2    vfat              FAT16            ANACONDA               23EA-7494                                           
└─sde3                                                                                                                  
sr0                                                                                                                     
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