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I am trying to install Ubuntu 20.04.1 and I am not getting past the following error message: Screen shot

Initramfs unpacking failed: Decoding failed

I first encountered the problem while trying to install Kubuntu onto a new machine with an ASUS Prime X570-Pro motherboard, an AMD Ryzen 9 3950X, a GeForce GTX 1660 Ti, 2x KINGSTON 32GB 3200MHz DDR4. There is no previous Windows installation on the system. Just FreeDOS. After trying to create a new bootable USB stick (using the same USB stick and another one, with dd on a different Linux machine and with Rufus on a Windows PC) I still ran into the same issue. This is when I tried Ubuntu hoping for more success. But still the same trouble. Does anybody know what can be done?

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  • Did you hashcheck the downloaded ISOs? Did you ever run a media check on the install media? Try a bittorrent or zsynch download if you have trouble getting a good ISO.
    – ubfan1
    Sep 21, 2020 at 17:18
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    I have sees this on both 20.04 LTS and 20.10 too, reported as bug 1886769
    – N0rbert
    Sep 21, 2020 at 20:40
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3 Answers 3

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I managed to boot into the installation by enabling the launch of the Compatibility Support Module (CSM) in the UEFI BIOS Utilities. In the CSM Configuration Boot Device Control was set to Legacy OPROM only and Boot from Network Devices, Boot from Storage Devices, Boot from PCI-E/PCI Expansion Devices were set to Legacy only. After that, the installation worked perfectly fine.

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I had this error, and for me the fix is outlined in this blog post: https://prognotes.net/2018/04/linux-mint-initramfs-prompt-at-boot/

In short:

Type exit to see if you can simply escape this situation and boot:

(initramfs) exit

In my case, it said the partition had an error and so dumped me back into the initramfs prompt. At this step, you need to run fsck on your filesystem. For me the command was what I have below, but the error will tell you which filesystem exactly is problematic, so just replace what I have below if it's different for you:

fsck /dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-root -y

Say "yes" to everything if you forget the -y.

Then run reboot and everything should work as normal.

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I'm anything but an expert, and I don't know if this has been answerd elsewhere, but: It had a similar problem, when booting Ubuntu 20.04.1 from an USB. In my case it seems that the GPU (RTX 2070) was the issue. Chosing the save graphics mode worked for me. I still got the message but it continued booting. (I used the try ubuntu option.) The first attempt to install ubuntu failed, however, just repeating the same worked for some reason. After that I installed all updates and selected the NVIDIA driver 455 in "Software & Updates" -> "Additional Drivers". Important: Only restart after you did both, updates and driver selection (I didn't and and it was a mess getting it to boot again...)

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