https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/rejected-chips-hidden-microsd-cards-plague-the-usb-stick-market/

they immediately told me to do an RMA and were eager to close the ticket.
quite the experience.

i asked the two reps responding to the ticket what was wrong with the drive
and one ignored me, the other said:

   "Probably a hardware failure."

the drive works perfectly fine, except for the not-bootable problem, so i am
skeptical the hardware is failing.

my guess is that corsair had a batch (or two or three) that had bad firmware
where the isbootable-bit in the code has not been set. oof!

i created a ticket on the corsiar website, will be interesting what kind of response i
will get, if any.

oh, and off-topic, but holy crap! about the corsair website. i was using one of my
highly restricted firefox profiles (you know, just in case) and the website pushes
you to install a firefox add-on that wants to become the default search engine.
just unbelievable. they are using a very dark dark-pattern to force this choice on
visitors. stay away from that website.

this doesn't reference your specific model/version but i wonder if corsair support is still so lacking?

https://forum.corsair.com/forums/topic/29621-voyager-bootable-linux/

sidenote: in the early days of thumbdrives we came across some that had "special" drivers and software on them as well as an autorun function(windows executable) that would automatically install "drivers" and offer to install and set-up some sort of encryption capability that may or may-not have been just for these brand/make/model/version of thumbdrives(too long ago to remember exactly). also, back in those days there were questions regarding alignment/block-size/erasing/formatting/secure-deletion/trimming/etc...sigh...

i would like to know exactly what corsair has to say for themselves and a product that doesn't perform the same as _virtually_any_and_every_other_external_storage_media_ so please keep us informed(even if you just return it for a refund/exchange/etc).

the USB drive i use is really fast, a corsiar voyager GTX 128GB.
but, for reasons, this USB drive is not bootable. wtf?

i copied the netinstall iso to a different USB drive (sandisk) and
was able to install without issue.

i will mark this as solved (though it isn't) as the problem i am having
lies elsewhere. the devuan netinstall iso works just fine.

thanks for the advise everyone

Anyhow, CSM support has been removed for every new computer design past about 2020 based on a decision by the big industry protagonists. It will not come back. I also own an Acer laptop bought in 2020 that is UEFI only.

About writing the iso image to the stick: make sure you use the raw device, not any partition. Example: of=/dev/sda is correct, of=/dev/sda1 is wrong, won't work. Also make sure to use the 5.01 version.

Also Ventoy is useless since Daedalus.

Good luck.

Is the link to it, the procedure is fairly simple.

i was not clear enough. i loop-mounted the iso file not the USB drive.
in an error about not being able to mount /cdrom.
my next idea is to disassemble the machine, extract the nvme drive,

Ah I was wondering if you had done the copy the iso to the install drive many do and you did not. That is same error I got when trying to use the installer. Save yourself the wasted time and effort use an installer that works a Debian one. Then convert the install to Devuan using the instructions they give for doing it that work perfectly fine when starting with that as a base to get it on the box. There are very few changes made from a stock Debian to this operating system. The main one being removing the systemd infestation from it and installing sysvinit.

i checked the USB drive as well by mounting it on a running system.

the ventoy trick did not work. ventoy was able to start the installer and i got to the
inital screen. after i hit the enter-key a bunch of boot-time ouput scrolled past ending
in an error about not being able to mount /cdrom. an emergency shell was created
but the keyboard was unresponsive, so i could not so anything in the emergency shell.

my next idea is to disassemble the machine, extract the nvme drive, move it to an
external enclousure, plug it into my old kabylake machine, which has CSM mode,
and install there, then move the nvme drive back to the new machine and reassemble it.

i loop-mounted the iso and all the EFI bits appear to be there, so i must be doing something wrong.

to get around this problem, i copied the netinstall iso to a ventoy USB drive and booted netinstall
from there.

just curious if anyone knows what is going on with UEFI boot? is it a 7700X thing?

If you loop mounted the iso from on the USB drive then you did it wrong when making the install USB with dd. There is nothing wrong with your booting UEFI as if there was the ventoy drive would have had the same problem booting when using it as UEFI selected from your boot menu.

i must be doing something really dumb but cannot figure out what.

i am trying to bring-up a ryzen 7700X system and want to use the daedalus netinstall iso.

the BIOS for this machine says it is EFI only due to the VBIOS of the 7700X CPU. not sure why that is
but that's what the BIOS says. it's MSI BIOS for B650 ITX motherboard.

the iso was copied to a USB drive via dd, as usual, but it is not recognized as a valid boot device
by the BIOS. for MSI, on reboot, F11 is used to get the boot drive selection menu and it does not
show the USB drive as a candidate.

i loop-mounted the iso and all the EFI bits appear to be there, so i must be doing something wrong.

to get around this problem, i copied the netinstall iso to a ventoy USB drive and booted netinstall
from there.

just curious if anyone knows what is going on with UEFI boot? is it a 7700X thing?