Linux Lite 5.0 USB only shows "grub>"

[Amit Lavon]

Hello. I just heard of LL and I'm excited to try it out  ;D

I flashed the 5.0 ISO on my USB drive and rebooted my PC. When booting from the USB drive, all I get is a "grub>" command line. No loading screen or anything. I expect a live version to run, correct me if that's not what it should do.

I am on Win10; BIOS Mode = Legacy; PC is about 6 years old.

I tried using Etcher to flash the drive as recommended. It reported success but rendered the drive unreadable. I tried Linux-Live and Rufus which I typically use for other Linux distros. They flashed the drive successfully but then I got the grub thing.

How can I make LL run? Happy to provide additional information if needed.

[Amit Lavon]

Update:

I tried to flash the drive from Linux using dd. After that I did get the boot menu (yay!), but then when I selected run live mode it said "you need to load the kernel first".

Huh?

[Valtam]

Start from scratch. Format the USB to fat32. In Windows get the latest Etcher here - https://github.com/balena-io/etcher/rele...1.5.95.exe
The drive should not be unreadable, make sure your BIOS is set correctly to boot the USB device first and/or press the correct key to boot from device when your pc starts, eg. on my HP laptop, it's F9.

[Amit Lavon]

Thank you for the quick response!

I tried again with Etcher. Windows can't read the USB drive after flashing. My BIOS did recognize it this time and I managed to run LL (woohoo!). But then after rebooting my BIOS stopped recognizing the USB drive as bootable (never had this issue with other distros).

So it kind of works but requires some retries and Windows doesn't like the image at all. I don't know if it's a problem with Etcher or with the image. Other distros boot perfectly from USB on my machine so it may be unlikely that it's a local issue.

Any ideas? Does anything of what I mentioned sound familiar?

[Valtam]

Try another burn, this time with Etcher open, press Ctrl + Shift + i That will bring up the dev console, set it to Verbose so you can see what is happening live. Take note of any errors and see if they exist here - https://github.com/balena-io/etcher/issues

[Moltke]

Thank you for the quick response!

I tried again with Etcher. Windows can't read the USB drive after flashing. My BIOS did recognize it this time and I managed to run LL (woohoo!). But then after rebooting my BIOS stopped recognizing the USB drive as bootable (never had this issue with other distros).

So it kind of works but requires some retries and Windows doesn't like the image at all. I don't know if it's a problem with Etcher or with the image. Other distros boot perfectly from USB on my machine so it may be unlikely that it's a local issue.

Any ideas? Does anything of what I mentioned sound familiar?

That is regular etcher behaviour; it formats the USB so Windows can't see it. I suggest you use rufus https://rufus.ie/ to burn the .iso in Windows and ty to boot again after doing so. I've used it and it's worked so far, haven't tried with LL 5.0 though.