Error Installing NixOS from LiveUSB

Help
1

I am trying to install NixOS for the first time using Ventoy. I have used Arch linux for the past 2 years and wanted to give NixOS a try but keep running into the same error. “An error occured in stage 1 of the boot process, which must mount the root file system on mnt-root and then start stage 2” What I have done:

  1. Tried using a different USB stock
  2. Reinstalled the latest NixOS ISO from the site
  3. Tried both Gnome and Plasma versions of the ISO
  4. Tried to manually mount /dev/root. This causes the error: “mounting /dev/root on /mnt-root/iso failed: Device or resource busy”
  5. Tried other USB image burners like balena-etcher, gnome-disks and unetbootin and still run into the same error.
    nixerror
    nixerror1920×3413 475 KB
2

I’m not sure if it’s a great idea to use this kind of tool to create the usb, people mentionned issues with them Hyper-V Dynamic Memory `hv_balloon: Memory hot add failed` · Issue #1276 · NixOS/nix · GitHub

So I’d just create the usb drive using:

sudo dd if=your_nixos.iso of=/dev/pathOfYourStickLike/dev/sdbcYouCanUseLsblkToFind bs=4M

(BUT BE SURE TO TRIPPLE CHECK IT AS IT MIGHT ERASE YOUR WHOLE DISK IF YOU PUT THE PATH TO HARD DRIVE INSTEAD OF THE USB)
If you still get issues it might behardware-related, maybe this is a good start ssd - 18.04 and 18.10 fail to boot nvme0: failed to set APST feature (-19) - Ask Ubuntu

3

try unplugging unnecessary usb device (webcam, audio, printer, …).
looking at your screen it looks like an usb device is failing.

Maybe you can check if :
is your bios up to date?
is the ventoy version the latest ? simplest thing to do may be the solution above
did you check the hash of the downloaded iso ? once copied to the usb stick too.
it seems related to a hardware/software boot issue preventing the root fs of the install cd to be mounted, thus failing.

4

As mentioned above, Ventoy likely somehow corrupted the stage2 squashfs. Just write the original ISO image to your USB disk yourself.

To avoid such mistakes it’s worth teaching yourself to always use the symlinks in /dev/disk when referring to devices.

cp latest-nixos-gnome-x86_64-linux.iso /dev/disk/by-id/usb-Intenso_Business_Line-0:0