you might want to maybe try a different distro image to verify, maybe a simple kernel with a net image or something.

This part actually makes me wonder… Do you think SerenityOS uses the Linux kernel? Because it does not, it’s its own completely separate thing. And the hardware support for anything other than the standard emulated machine is very iffy, so it doesn’t seem too surprising that it would get tripped up by something on an old computer.

If anything went wrong with its USB stack for example, the kernel would have no way to find the root filesystem that’s stored on a USB drive.

At the weekend I’ll have some time to fiddle with it.

I think I’ll try to boot Serenity first from USB, check if it wants to boot at all. Maybe I’ll got an Arduino to use as serial monitor to check the log.

Then move on to flashing the grub image to the HDD, again, with a different IDE drive. if thst doesn’t work, I’ll find a SATA HDD and flash that.

I really wanna see this OS boot on real hardware. Then take a good lookaround and develop or port something for it :)