I’ve been trying to boot a Ubuntu 24.04 USB (please no discussion of distro choice) but I keep getting a very unhelpful error during the initial startup. I’ve tried using a different USB drive, a different USB port, booting from UEFI. The only thing that has made a change was booting into safe graphics mode. It got to the install wizard but when I got to the end of the wizard it gave me other seemingly useless error messages.

I’m concerned there’s an issue with my motherboard but I don’t have strong evidence to support this idea. I recently took a trip where the computer was fine before I left. I turned it off while I was away and when I came back my main drive no longer worked. I couldn’t boot from it or even see the drive in gparted. I’ve replaced the drive without issue though. If my motherboard is somehow going bad, it’s being very subtle about it. I was ready to blame Nvidia but when I got it into safe graphics mode, it didn’t get to the point of having Nvidia drivers.

Does anyone have any idea what might be going on or any way I can get additional information about the errors I’m getting? The lack of information is really frustrating.