NixOS ISO Installer Not Working

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1

On the most recent nixos ISOs (yes, I’ve tried all of them, and 23.11), they all result in this odd behavior:

Show grub menu, flash an message that says to press T, then boots me back to the select boot device screen of my bios. I was able to get the live USB of Ubuntu and Fedora to load, but not any of the nixos ones. I even tried building my own but that resulted in the same behavior as well.

Any ideas? I’m trying to install it on a device with an Intel Alder Lake N100 CPU.

I just want to use nix on this thing. Is it possible to install via a different live linux ISO?

specifically this one fwiw

Video of the error:
https://youtu.be/1Sl7o5bHbJQ

2

How are you writing your ISO to the USB drive?

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3

Try turning Secure Boot off in the BIOS/UEFI

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4

sudo dd bs=4M conv=fsync oflag=direct status=progress if=nixos-gnome-24.05.6529.9256f7c71a19-x86_64-linux.iso of=/dev/sdc

(as outlined from the wiki)

I tried on multiple different USB drives, and they all function the same. Wiped them before I do this too.

5

Same behavior. It just appears the ISO doesn’t have a boot disk even though it does (see video).

6

This sounds like the issue with the EFI files being in the wrong case again?

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7

I guess we never backported that fix to 24.05. You could try an unstable iso. (gnome, minimal, plasma6)

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8

Yes this is exactly it, @srd424 thank you.

Glad I could find other people dealing with this issue at the least. Putting links here for reference:

And @ElvishJerricco I’ll try that next, thanks!

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9

Trying the following resulted in the same behavior as well.

nixos-gnome-24.11pre706477.dc460ec76cbf-x86_64-linux.iso

nixos-minimal-24.11pre705705.76612b17c0ce-x86_64-linux.iso

I think I’ll just go with this ‘solution’ next…

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