I have an HP Mini where I run NixOS with Enlightenment for a couple of years now. I was always able to connect to a screen and initiate a graphical user session. I also had it setup to connect via SSH.
I recently updated to 25.05. I couldn’t update to 25.11 because of conflicts with Enlightnment econmann and python. Now the display works till some point of Stage 2 (end of it?) and then the screen goes black. Tried different things based on online search, nothing worked. I also had all previous generations going back to the beginning, tried entering a few of them - same behavior. I am therefore not sure at which point this started happening, but I am confident that with some older generations it was working.
I decided to do a fresh install, NixOS 25.11 with LxQT. The display worked with the live USB, the screen was flickering from time to time, then back to normal. After I completed the installation, I rebooted. I allowed “unfree software” in case the installer would choose proprietary firmware that might be related to the issue. The same thing happens, the last message that I manage to see is “/dev/mapper……” something, then the screen goes black.
Share your configuration. In the installer, use nixos-enter to enter your system, and then use journalctl --boot -1 to get your last boot’s logs.
Share those logs too; use ssh to copy them out (the installer comes with openssh, the manual explains how you turn it on), or you could send them via a ntfy.sh topic or something.
Thanks for the prompt and helpful response. I did some more testing, installation still always successfully finishes but when I try to mount the drive to then nixos-enter it always fail with a generic bad filesystem message. The SMART status report lists “good” health status but with way too many bad sectors. The HP’s own hard disk check available at the BIOS freezes at 1% when doing the extensive check while it finishes successfully the quick check.
I still see some behavior I don’t have an explanation yet - NixOS live USB always loads its graphical UI and finishes installation, then presents the problem post-installation, while Fedora presents the problem with the live USB before its graphical UI kicks in and thus not able to install. Always it was always working with SSH (no UI) until a few days ago, now the problem is present even when choosing no desktop on the installer. But I’m more oriented to this being a hardware failure - taking some more steps to validate that currently.
So, I tried nixos-enter on another machine with a fully functioning NixOS LxQT installation. I get the same errors and I must be missing something.
When I try to mount the root partition (/dev/sda2 in this case), I get the error:
$ sudo mount -o bind /dev/sda2 /mnt/
mount: /mnt: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda2, missing codepage or helper program, or other error. dmesg(1) may have more information after failed mount system call.
dmesg does not report any any errors, it justs reports mounting and then automatically unmounting it.
$ mount -o bind /dev/disk/by-label/<ROOT_LABEL> /mnt/
$ # mount any partitions you might have; here we assume only home and nix exist
$ mkdir -p /mnt/{home,nix}
$ mount -o bind /dev/disk/by-label/<HOME_LABEL> /mnt/home
$ mount -o bind /dev/disk/by-label/<NIX_LABEL> /mnt/nix