Arch and Gentoo ISOs cannot mount rootfs causing kernel panic

[SammyCyber]

When booting to the Arch ISO I get the message error: file '/arch/boot/intel-ucode.img' not found. after which I get a kernel panic with the message VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0). With the Gentoo LiveUSB it's a similar story, where I get the following message:

dracut Warning: ZFS: No bootfs attribute found in importable pools.
dracut: ZFS: No sysroot.mount exists or zfs-generator did not extend it.
dracut: ZFS: Mounting root with the traditional mount-zfs.sh instead.
no pools available to import

repeated multiple times before it too says it couldn't mount the root filesystem and drops me into a debug shell. This happens with both legacy boot and UEFI mode.

I don't think this is a problem with the ISOs themselves as I don't encounter this problem when booting directly from the USB after burning the image to it, just when booting from GLIM.

I'm not sure if other images have this problem, but I know that the Linux Mint ISOs (Cinnamon, XFCE, and LMDE variants), GParted, and Memtest (both .bin and .efi) do not, and they boot without any problems from GLIM.

[tfachada]

I think the problem/solution for Arch is here: #130.

By the way, right now I'm not able to reach the stage you reached. My pen doesn't even get recognized as a boot option, even though a single-boot one does. Since you're a recent user, if I may ask... you mounted a single-partition FAT32 pen named GLIM, cloned the repo, changed directory to the repo, executed ./glim.sh, said yes to installing for EFI, and copied the arch iso to /boot/iso/arch on the pen... and that was it, right?

[SammyCyber]

Thanks for linking the PR, it does work when I make the changes to the arch.cfg file as described, but I instead decided to use the older ISO version that didn't have the breaking change in case an update to glim reset arch.cfg.

When you say it doesn't get recognised as a boot option, do you mean that when you set the USB to a higher boot priority it still boots into your main OS? That was happening to me too so I had to access the boot menu (F7 for me) and boot the USB from there. Also remember to disable secure boot.

[tfachada]

Thanks for linking the PR, it does work when I make the changes to the arch.cfg file as described, but I instead decided to use the older ISO version that didn't have the breaking change in case an update to glim reset arch.cfg.

Fair. Perhaps you could use the same temporary workaround for Gentoo? Though I'm not sure about what's causing the issue there.

When you say it doesn't get recognised as a boot option, do you mean that when you set the USB to a higher boot priority it still boots into your main OS? That was happening to me too so I had to access the boot menu (F7 for me) and boot the USB from there. Also remember to disable secure boot.

Yes, I tried that. The drive just doesn't even get recognized as an option (my laptop's bios only lists USB if there's a recognized bootable device there).

Meanwhile I tried on other computers and it actually works there. Probably some random weirdness in my laptop's firmware. I'll try to dig into this deeper and maybe open an issue. Thanks anyway.

Edit: My current firmware just doesn't support USB 3 lol. When I plugged the drive through an adapter it worked.