The day before I decided to install the latest Fedora (20) MATE spin. I downloaded the iso image and used rufus to create a bootable USB drive.
Once I restarted my computer and chose to boot from UEFI:USB Fedora began to load but unfortunately it soon got stuck and threw the following error:
dracut Warning: /dev/disk/by-label/Fedora-Live-MATE-Compiz-x86_64-2 does not exist Dropping to debug shell dracut:/ #
Since it dropped to a shell prompt it was easy for me to list the content of /dev/disk/by-label/. There was nothing in that directory, so I had an idea about what was going on and that the one to blame for this issue was the program I used to write the image on the USB drive.
First option I could think of was to change the boot parameters (just select Fedora Live in grub menu and press ESC. then e for edit, make the changes, press enter then b). However changing “live:CDLABEL” to “live:/dev/sdc1” did not work for me, the system got stuck so it was time to go the “right” way and use raw copy method to write the iso image on the USB drive, this is how you should proceed if you encounter the same problem:
1. Boot into an existing OS GNU/Linux or MAC OS (I had Linux Mint already installed) – this works for Microsoft Windows also, but you need 3rd party utilities like HDD Raw Copy.
2. Use dd (or the 3rd party utility) to copy the iso image to the USB drive
dd if=/home/username/downloads/Fedora-Live-MATE-Compiz-x86_64-20-1.iso of=/dev/sdc
Be careful, your drive may be not listed under /dev/sdc but under a different path! This will DESTROY ALL the data currently on the USB drive!
In fact, I directly used dd method to create the LIVE USB, But I still getting this stuck. And also I found out that my /dev/disk/by-label/ got EFI and some other stuff. Totally stuck not sure how to deal with it.
What version are you trying to install?
use unetbootin it has settings for most distros