Overview

I was trying to dual boot Ubuntu and continually running into an issue running my Ubuntu Live USB on my Lenovo P720. Whenever I would boot into my Live USB I would get the error Initramfs unpacking failed: Decoding failed and a black screen with glitchy colors on it.

Solution

I solved this by doing two things:

1. Disabling Secure Boot
2. Running Ubuntu in Safe Graphics mode

Disabling Secure Boot

To disable secure boot:

• Enter your system's BIOS menu
• Go to BIOS settings
• Find the Secure Boot configuration setting
• Set Secure Boot to disabled (or false on some machines)

Run Ubuntu in Safe Graphics mode

The next thing I did was run Ubuntu in Safe Graphics mode. Safe Graphics mode runs Ubuntu with graphics configurations that play nice with most graphics cards. In my case, I was running an Nvidia GTX 4000 and that seemed to be crashing the normal Ubuntu install.

To run in Safe Graphics mode:

• Enter your system's BIOS menu
• Select your Live USB to boot into Ubuntu GRUB menu
• From GRUB, you should see two options Ubuntu and Ubuntu (Safe Graphics), select the latter