Installer won't boot on mac mini (late 2014)

I’m trying to install nixos on an old mac mini (late 2014) I got from work but the live USB won’t even boot up. It crashes in stage 1.

mounting /dev/root on /iso...
mounting /mnt-root/iso/nix-store.squashfs on /nix/.ro-store...
mounting tmpfs on /nix/.rw-store...
mounting overlay on /nix/store...
stage 2 init script (/mnt-root//init) not found

An error occurred in stage 1 of the boot process, which must mount the
root filesystem on `/mnt-root` and then start stage 2.  Press one
of the following keys:

I dropped into a PID 1 interactive shell by pressing f at this point and checked in /mnt-root and there is no init file. I checked the stage-1-init.sh script which is symlinked to /init and found the point at which that error occurs. I manually symlinked stage 2 to /mnt-root/init and ran the remaining commands from the stage 1 script but at the final command (running stage 2 via exec), it just hangs forever with no output.

Has anyone had any luck with this?

I have also tried installing remotely using nixos-anywhere and that hangs at kexec/initrd so I think it might be the same problem happening there.

I have successfully installed arch linux on it with no issues and I’m really hoping I can get NixOS on there!

Solved this! I was using Ventoy which I guess does something weird. I burned the ISO directly to the USB and now it boots fine

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