initramfs unpacking failed

wanted to finally try to switch to linux for my gaming desktop and thought i might try the hot new stuff. Unfortunately that ended before it began: at the installation process lmao. I recon it might have something to to with how i prep the USB stick? My problem:
boot to USB select Install bazzite from grub menu "initramfs unpacking failed: XZ compressed data is corrupt" shows for a second KERNEL PANIC! VFS: unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)
what i did:
from my laptop that is running debian 13: went to bazzite website clicked download chose "Desktop, AMD 4xx+ GPU, KDE Plasma, traditional desktop experience" downloaded iso plugged in USB (did NOT mount it) ran: sudo dd if=~/Downloads/bazzite-stable-amd64.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=4M status=progress oflag=sync where /dev/sdb is my usb stick waited to finish unplugged USB from latop tried running the installer on my main pc
what i tried so far:
disable secure boot disable TPM compared checksum with sha256sum tool and the checksum file provided on the bazzite website (was OK) reflashing with "cp" did not even create a bootable stick (at least not efi bootable with CSM i always landed in grub shell)
Any Ideas? :S
5 Replies
Ruven ✨
Ruven ✨3w ago
Welcome to Bazzite! Idk what went wrong there, sorry, but I’ve always used Fedora Media Writer to make my Bazzite USBs. Bazzite is Fedora, so using their tool is a no fuss solution. https://github.com/FedoraQt/MediaWriter/releases
GitHub
Releases · FedoraQt/MediaWriter
Fedora Media Writer - Write Fedora Images to Portable Media - FedoraQt/MediaWriter
Matze
MatzeOP3w ago
Heyo thanks for the answer. However in the meantime i decided to try CachyOS first. Nonetheless i faced similar issues with cachy where my drive wouldn't be detected when disabling CSM and not beeing able to boot with CSM enabled (Also tried 3 different drives). I think it is actually an issue with my BIOS. I also tried using balenaEtcher to create the USB stick once with the same result. I noticed that with DD as well as balenaEtcher it created a hybrid iso USB stick with the EFI stuff in the same partition as everything else. I thought maybe my BIOS cant handle that kind of stuff so i just erased the stick, created a fat32 EFI partition size 100 MiB, added boot flag to it, created second partition from the rest of the drive as exFat, and then manually copied the EFI directory from the iso into the EFI partition and the rest into the second partition. To be sure nothing goes wrong i also added the EFI directory from the iso into the second partition. Now, while im writing this, i am finally installing an OS :D I guess my BIOS doesnt fare well with DD written boot media in UEFI mode? Is there a setting i might have missed in BIOS? Anyways now that i know hoe to do it i can test bazzite in the future if cachy is too much of a maintainance hassle for me.
nagito || Knight of Emilia
DD does nothing special it just writes the ISO to the drive making the drive an exact byte by byte clone of the ISO
Matze
MatzeOP3w ago
Yeah i guess the problem was that my bios needs a dedicated EFI partition to boot a medium.
nagito || Knight of Emilia
ISOs usually don't have this they have special filesystem flags which tell the UEFI firmware to load a file called efi.img on the ISO & this acts as the EFI partition yours doesn't respect this it seems oh it's efiboot.img https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=240034

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