For some reason when I downloaded the usb image at
https://tails.hirlimann.net/tails/alpha/tails-amd64-4.0~beta2/tails-amd64-4.0~beta2.img <
https://tails.hirlimann.net/tails/alpha/tails-amd64-4.0~beta2/tails-amd64-4.0~beta2.img> the usb image has issues. It came up as if the usb drive was failing, producing constant kernel level failures, and not loading the tails desktop up. It did load the initial screen, but since the desktop was unusable, I had to fix the problem unconventionally.
In order to fix the problem, I manually resized the EFI System Partition and converted the EFI system back to a standard DOS bootable partition using fdisk. For some reason fdisk was interpreting the master boot record to have bizarre sector alignments for the EFI System Partition, and the boot partition's boot loader also had bizarre sector alignments that far exceeded the size of any typical USB drive. While the EFI System Partition may not generally be a problem, fdisk expected a certain EFI configuration when making these changes, that I did not care to familiarize myself with. That is why I converted it back to a standard bootable DOS partition.
I also resized the filesystem to be a little larger to accomodate the larger EFI System Partition.
Once I made these changes and updated the master boot record and boot partitions, I was able to boot into tails without issue.
My guess is that the problem had nothing to do with EFI, but did have to do with the size of the EFI System Partition.
On the other hand, if the partition was not being interpreted correctly by the kernel, like fdisk noticing the
bizarre sector alignments, then that could have easily produced the errors. Why it prevented the desktop from loading is anyones guess, since the squash filesystem was good.
Best Regards,
Christ
