Fails to boot into installation utility
I've got Bazzite installed onto a bootable USB drive, and when I attempt to boot into the installer I get a strange error and the utility fails. Was doing research to see if this is a common error, but I can't find anything on it. Wanted to see if someone is familiar with this and knows how to fix it?
28 Replies
Have you tried reflashing the USB?
Or better to ask: what are the things you already tried to fix it?
Yeah, that was the first thing I tried. I thought that maybe something happened in the flashing process so I flashed again. Same problem. Triple checked some videos to make sure I didn't miss anything when it comes to flashing Bazzite, and looks like I went through the steps correctly.
I will do a quick test on my other computer though just to eliminate the boot drive being an issue.
This error is caused by some invalid utf8 characters in volume/partition labels, which python does not tolerate well.
We've had a user like this before
Anaconda (which is the installer that installs Bazzite, based on python) tries to read volume information but fails because of some utf-8 character encoding problem
The only fix for this is to use something else to edit drive and volume/partition labels to standard English characters, such as GParted Live, and then load the Bazzite installer again.
Are you talking about the name of the boot drive like this?
That's the current name of the drive partition
Would just reflashing the ISO again with a different name do the same?
I just used Rufus, and that's the name it gave it by default
No, the labels of your other drives
Internal drives
The boot drive is fine it only contains basic characters
There are some non standard characters in the labels or other drive attributes that are causing the utf8 error
That's strange because they all seem to have normal names. So do I have to install this GParted Live onto another drive? Looks like an ISO, and I don't see an option for a .exe windows installer.
Something about the attributes or name of your partitions or drive is causing python to puke out an encoding error.
It's 100% something with reading drive/partition/filesystem attributes and its character encoding.
@wolfyreload this user has same error but no unusual characters?
Remember ANY attached drive, including other drives, external drives etc etc will be read and could potentially cause that issue
It could also be any partition name, not just drive labels
Partition name can be completely different from the drive label. iirc the drive label doesn't affect the installer at all. Only weird characters in the partition name is an issue
GitHub
UnicodeDecodeError when reading GPT PartitionName · Issue #490 · py...
Hello, In Subiquity (the Ubuntu Server installer), we are using pyudev to list and retrieve information about the different devices that we can install on. We are iterating over all the properties ...
This is probably related
@wolfyreload
Kernel bug with a fix that was never merged. So this isn't anaconda's fault after all.
That's unusual. I usually blame anaconda for everything lol 😂
Python is just overly strict on unicode stuff too
@Noel can you get somebody from anaconda on this
like come on really lol
I mean, based on reading this, it's an issue in the Python spec itself on how it handles unicode.
What do you suggest the anaconda team does?
handle the exception?
use a different file type?
seems its a bug in pyudev
I can file something over to the team.
I put it in the #anaconda matrix room. I'll see if they want me to file something on Jira.
It's a kernel bug in how utf16 is parsed from gpt partition tables apparently
But I'm not sure if that patch was ever merged
https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-block/patch/[email protected]/
I'm not 100% sure if this is the same problem
But I would be somewhat surprised if it isn't
Yeah this shit was never merged:
So this means its probably better to fix it in pyudev
Neal recommended getting visability here too: https://github.com/storaged-project/blivet/issues
GitHub
Issues · storaged-project/blivet
A python module for configuration of block devices - Issues · storaged-project/blivet
pyudev said "not our problem, fix upstream" and then it was never fixed upstream
You could do a very simple fix by changing the code in pyudev to add
errors="replace" that turns invalid characters into � characters.Or alternatively just
gdisk your drives and change the problematic partition namesyes, but we were talking about long term solution for when the next user comes with the same issue. this is #2 already 😂
@Linus Xu Is gdisk in the bazzite ISO?
because if the installer fails to run you can probably still go to TTY2
otherwise use Gparted Live
I vaguely recall yes
Or the original OS on the system
fair but windows really doesn't want you to change partnames
loves to stop you from doing so
@sonicnerd14 Read:
What you need to do is make a live usb with Gparted Live.
With this tool you can also check the partition names.
See picture for example (under "Name")
Check if there's any non-standard alphabet characters (a-z A-Z 0-9) and if they do, rename them by replacing the characters. Do this for every drive attached.
If you have any USB drives not needed for installation, you can also just remove those drives before installing.
Download:
https://gparted.org/livecd.php (If you only have 1 USB drive, use Ventoy to add multiple ISO's to 1 USB drive)
