Athena OS ISO fails to boot on Lenovo laptop (UEFI boot failure / kernel panic)

[e-rezamahdavi]

Athena OS version

3e5a315040f6be99defdaacf60151e79d852714088255f176b0eb0f8ca320c52

Which environment or technology are you using?

• Baremetal
• VirtualBox Virtual Machine
• VMware Virtual Machine
• Hyper-V Virtual Machine
• QEMU/KVM
• Parallels
• UTM
• Container
• WSL

Kernel version

No response

Involved software

Description

I'm unable to boot the latest Athena OS ISO on my Lenovo Lenovo 83LK laptop.

I tested multiple USB creation methods and encountered two different issues.

Test 1 - Rufus (UEFI:NTFS)

The boot process stops before the kernel starts with:

Launching 'EFI\Boot\BOOTx64.EFI'...
[FAIL] Load failure: [3] Unsupported

Test 2 - Ventoy

The kernel starts successfully but ends with a kernel panic:

VFS: Cannot open root device "" or unknown-block(0,0): error -6
Please append a correct "root=" boot option
Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)

What I tested

• Verified the ISO SHA256 checksum (correct).
• Created the USB with:
  • Rufus (NTFS)
  • Rufus (FAT32)
  • Ventoy
• Enabled and disabled Secure Boot.
• Boot mode is UEFI.

Additional information

The official Arch Linux ISO boots successfully on the same laptop using the same USB drive and BIOS settings.

Therefore, the problem appears to be specific to the Athena OS ISO.

Hardware

• Laptop: Lenovo 83LK
• BIOS: Q8CN21WW
• Boot Mode: UEFI

I have attached screenshots of both errors.

Please let me know if you need any additional logs or testing.

Repro steps

Expected behavior

Actual behavior

Diagnostic logs

No response

[D3vil0p3r]

Not clear what is the Athena OS version. Did you download the ISO from https://hub.athenaos.org/iso/athenaos-live-x86_64.iso ?

[e-rezamahdavi]

Yes i download from https://hub.athenaos.org/iso/athenaos-live-x86_64.iso

[D3vil0p3r]

By Rufus did you try to do the process by keeping in FAT32 (default) and to use the DD mode?

[e-rezamahdavi]

No default iso mode not dd

[D3vil0p3r]

Try by dd. Meanwhile I created a ticket to Ventoy to support Athena ISO

[e-rezamahdavi]

I was finally able to boot, but with the dd command in the arch terminal.
Ventoi and Refus didn't work for me with any partition format or even Refus dd mode.
Always trust the terminal.