I purchased the Framework 16 DIY edition laptop with AMD Ryzen™ AI 9 HX 370 CPU and 2nd Gen Radeon™ RX 7700S graphics card. Even though OS installs are normally easy I had a long battle getting PopOS to install. Here are the steps I tool to fix them.
This document summarizes the issues I ran into, the exact error messages, and the fixes that ultimately worked, along with why those fixes were needed.
I was getting the error unable to find a live medium containing a live file system.
There were multiple issues to fix this one
The Framework 16’s USB controller can behave poorly with USB 3.x paths during early Linux boot.
The installer fails to reliably access the live filesystem on the USB device. This causes it to fail and go back to asking for a URL to install from since it cannot access the filesystem
I used a usb 3.0 drive and a USB A to C adapter that was 2.0. I also saw many people had success with a USB 2.0 hub, but that did not work for me.
- Use: https://www.ventoy.net/
- Disable “Secure Boot Support” in Ventoy
- Power on → press F2 repeatedly to enter full BIOS setup
⚠️ If you enter setup via the “failed boot” recovery screen, Secure Boot options may not appear. - Go to Administer Secure Boot
- Disable Secure Boot
- Plug the USB into slot 1 or 4 (closest to the screen)
- Slot 4 worked reliably for me
- System hangs indefinitely on the Pop!_OS splash screen
- No installer UI appears
- Disabling splash shows logs but no progress
This is caused by early GPU initialization issues with the AMD graphics stack on the Framework 16.
The kernel attempts to initialize accelerated graphics too early and stalls.
Pop!_OS does not expose a menu option like Ubuntu’s Safe Graphics, but it supports the same behavior.
- At the Pop!_OS boot menu, highlight Try or Install Pop!_OS
- Press
eto edit boot parameters - Find:
quiet splash
4. Replace or append: `nomodeset`
NOTE: I tried some other work around for the USB issue in this screen shot, but in the end they were not needed.
5. Boot with **Ctrl+X** or **F10**
- Disables GPU mode-setting and hardware acceleration
- Forces a basic framebuffer
- Avoids early AMD GPU initialization bugs
- Equivalent to Ubuntu’s “Safe Graphics” option This will also help you debug since you can see raw logs
That is it! From there everything else installed as normal. This took me almost 8 hours (4 where from a bad USB flash drive that was old and dropped random files ... took forever to figure out what was happening). After the install is done be sure to update everything (firmware especially) and then the laptop works great! Hope this saves someone else hours of time.