Librem 13v2: Qubes stuck at "Booting from Hard Disk" after install

Software
10

Hello! Yesterday I got my 13v2 with a 250GB SSD, have installed Qubes os 3.2 on it but I have the same problem. I tried many times to fix it with all your precious informations:

It seems to work correctly in the troobleshooting, but here is the result when I reboot:

Booting from Hard Disk...
.
error: no such device: 626f3abe-d6eb-423a-a751-b4ffbc450e08
Entering rescue mode...
grub rescue>

Here (with lsblk) we can see that the installation target is sda and not sdb:

Qubes os - lsblk
Qubes os - lsblk3264×2448 1.43 MB

Now I’m discouraged cause I really need to learn more about Qubes.
Are you willing to give me some ideas to solve the problem?

1 Like
11

@tde Yeah, /dev/sda seems to be where Qubes has been installed, and so that is the grub install target we want.

However, it seems grub is configured to search for the wrong device on boot.

If you ‘chroot /mnt/sysimage’, can you locate a grub.cfg file under the /boot directory and see what device it is configured to boot from?

2 Likes
12

@d2r Thank you very much for your feedback!

I have chroot /mnt/sysimage, and located the grub.cfg file under /boot directory with:
ls -R /mnt/sysimage/boot

Qubes - ls -R mnt sysimage boot
Qubes - ls -R mnt sysimage boot3264×2448 1.63 MB

But I don’t know yet how I can see what device it is configured to boot from.
I need to make further research and experiences.
Maybe you are willing to show me how I can proceed to find the device?

13

Before I check further, are you certain you followed step 1) chroot /mnt/sysimage above before executing the grub commands?

If you did not, then that could lead to the symptom that you are seeing on boot. The disk may have tried to boot to the usb device instead of the hard disk.

14

Hello,

I just wanted to hop in this conversation, I have tried the R4-rc1 version of Qubes (see this blog post if you missed the news), and I did not encountered this issue on my 13v2.

So depending of your need, and patience, you can wait for the final version of R4 (or already hop in the RC? Keeping in mind, that it is an RC, so things could go wrong…).

1 Like
15

@d2r Yes I followed step 1) before executing the grub commands. Now my plan is to test Qubes 4.0-rc1 and wait for the stable release. However I’m grateful for the advices you gave me cause I needed support.

@Mayeu thanks for the information, now I’m feeling hopeful! I’ll test the R4-rc1 asap.

1 Like
16

Ok @tde. Good luck. I tried a pre-rc1 version of Qubes 4 and it did not have the installer issue (it did not skip the grub install), and it did not have any trouble resuming from suspend, however several qubes features were not working for me. Hopefully you will have better luck.

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17

How is the battery life with the R4-rc1? That wasn’t easily available when I was going through this (I have since been using Linux Mint). Tempted to try this out.

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18

Hi @jguluarte, I can’t honestly comment on that. Mostly I was trying things out and not really using the laptop as I normally would on battery power. I did not notice any excessive power consumption though.

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19

Using aarmea’s workaround, augmented with d2r’s lsblk piece worked perfectly for me on a fresh Librem v2 with just one encrypted NVMe SSD. Thanks, guys!

2 Likes
20

Thanks, this worked for me as well. Was able to boot, which is fantastic!

Curious as to the XEN_DEFAULT command line, though. Why is it beneficial to have “console=none”? Also, I’ve read that dom0_mem should be set to a fixed size, like “dom0_mem=min:1024M dom0_mem=max:1024M” but I can’t find good recommendations for what that value should be for machines of different sizes.

Regardless, thanks for posting this out!

1 Like
21

Recently received my librem. I notice the same issue.

I used the same steps above except with:
GRUB_CMDLINE_XEN_DEFAULT=“console=none dom0_mem=2048M,max:2048M”

Therefore have static mem as recommended here:
https://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Xen_Project_Best_Practices

Also booting OK. . .

22

This may be a very simplistic solution, but I was able to get qubes to install properly with Coreboot detection disabled so thought I’d share. I encountered the same issue where after submitting the command ln -sf /bin/true /usr/sbin/dmidecode && systemctl restart anaconda the screen appeared black. As mentioned, you can still see the background but it is extremely dim… Too dark to navigate the install.

The solution was simply to go through the installation (without disabling coreboot detection – just the normal way) using only the keyboard. Write down the keystrokes used to configure all of the settings (install location, disk encryption password, etc.) the way you want it, all the way through to install completion and rebooting the computer. (e.g. Tab, down down enter, tab tab space, tab space… you get the picture) Then go back through the install again, run the shell command above to disable coreboot detection and follow your recorded keystores despite the barely visible screen. When the installation finishes and you reboot your librem laptop, the backlight goes back to working fine and you get the standard qubes boot up you’re looking for.

Cheers!

23

hey, not working for me please someone help

24

Just to chime in:

I had the same problem:

  • Librem 15 Version 3, delivered with USB Qubes-R3.2-x86_64.
  • After installing qubes the machine gets stuck in boot process with the message: Booting from Hard Disk

SOLUTION:

  • I downloaded Qubes-R4.0-x86_64.iso from the qubes website,
  • made a bootable USB (the instructions are given on the qubes website: https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/installation-guide/
  • and installed this new qubes version on my librem.
    Now it boots. If everything works as expected in qubes I still have to find out.

SUGGESTION TO THE PURISM TEAM:

  • Since the librem community is highly focused on security and privacy they are well aware of the fact that qubes is probably one of the os that optimally hits the tradeoff-sweetspot between sec&priv and user friendliness. Therefore, many will want to use it, possibly including Whonix.
  • Delivering a qubes version that is known not to work with librem laptops - or at least not without jumping through major hoops (changing coreboot options, etc. by using terminal in the qubes installer - see the earlier comments of users) is not helpful.
  • I would suggest 3 alternative solutions: 1) Exchange the qubes R3 version on USB sticks for R4 OR 2) put a notification on the purism Q&A website about this problem OR 3) make this information at least more easily findable in the forum. This page is well hidden in the purism forum. It took many search queries on the forum site to get to this page - naturally, no way of finding it through conventional search engines e.g. DuckDuck, searx.

I have also written an e-mail with those suggestions to the purism team.

FYI:
I am not a Linux geek. I would consider myself a normal computer user but with fair knowledge about privacy and security. I just know the very basics in Linux and I am happy if I achieve to use basic commands in the terminal. So maybe exactly the kind of customer Purism would like to address (high privacy concerns/medium computer skills) …?
E.g. I would have had quite some hesitations to get qubes R3 running by following the comments by other users, because I would have feared to completely mess up my machine.

25

I agree that this info should be more easily viewable from the ordering page, but here is a post which explains why it’s currently 3.2 and not 4.0.

https://puri.sm/posts/qubes4-fully-working-on-librem-laptops/

TLDR: 3.2 used to work, 4.0 was/is being tested for compatibility.

But if 3.2 isn’t working now, it seems like they should make the switch to 4.0 pretty soon.

26

Thanks for the valuable link! I probably was one of the last customers to receive a USB with qubes R3 because now I understand you are shipping it with R4.
I understand that things in terms of up-to-date versions/compatibility issues change very quickly in the computer industry meaning that it is almost impossible to be constantly ahead of the game. Great job guys!

BTW: Purism support rocks! This really sets purism apart from today’s anonymous corporate world!

27

Could I kindly ask for anyone to lend me a hand installing the Qubes 4.0 on my librem 13, V2? I looked on the Qubes site but I don’t see any .deb file anywhere. As it may of course be totally obvious to you, I am new to Linux, so please have pity.

28

@OntheMain

First of all, a lot of people new to linux get frustrated quickly when it’s not exactly what they’re used to with windows, so thank you for asking politely :grin:

You won’t find a Qubes .deb package. Qubes is a totally different “distribution” from PureOS. In windows there are only a few “distributions”, like windows 8, windows 10, windows mobile, etc…

Since linux is open-source, there are thousands of distributions, and any teenager could make a new one in their basement over the weekend. They all share the linux kernel - the fundamental “core” of linux - but different distributions can be wildly different.

Since Qubes is a different distribution, you will need to get the Qubes .iso file and burn it to a USB stick. Then, boot from the USB stick, and install Qubes as your new OS.

.deb files are software packages that you can only install on distros that use the debian package management system. Ubuntu, PureOS and Linux Mint are examples of linux distros that would accept .deb files.

.iso files are full disk images, that you have to copy to a USB drive or DVD, and then you can tell your computer to boot off the disk image

You can’t just drag and drop the Qubes .iso file to the usb stick though. You will need to use a program, like unetbootin, to make the usb stick bootable.

P.S. Since Qubes is based on Red Hat, their package files will end in .rpm

P.P.S I haven’t used Qubes or the Librem yet myself (in the mail yay) so I can’t help too much with specifics

1 Like
29

Adding to what @gnulligan said:

It may help to understand the basic priciple of Qubes and its purpose before you start playing around with it, as it is a bit more complicated than your average OS.

Qubes main architecture is based on a hypervisor (Xen), which works like a backbone from which the “real” OS are run as virtual machines. You can have several OS templates in Qubes. It is shipped with Fedora (Red Hat) and Whonix (Debian). So strictly speaking there are no software packages for Qubes itself, only for the respective OS templates you decide to have it run. It is theoretically possible to even run a Windows template in Qubes (and it has been explored in Qubes 3.2), but that is very difficult to set up.

Qubes can do a lot for you in terms of security and it runs quite fine on a Librem I must say, but changing to Qubes from Windows is taking a significantly larger step than changing to, say, PureOS. On the bright side that means you will definitely be forced to understand a lot about how Linux works if you decide to give it a serious try. :slight_smile:

1 Like