Hi, I thought I'd give Bodhi 5 a try.
I checked the md5, got it onto a USB using the usual YUMI, but as it's starting to load, showing the leaf icon with the circle animation (splash screen I guess? in place of an hourglass), it exits and shows this message:

"BusyBox v1.27.2 (Ubuntu 1:1.27.2-2ubuntu3) built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.
(initramfs) _ "

Hardware is a small netbook, with dual-core Atom N280, 2GB of RAM.
No hard drive (yet) - just trying to run it "live" at this point.
thanks

edit: Bodhi 4.5 works fine except for the menu (if you open on the right, it goes off-screen).

i never had trouble with my yumi usb writes, but did with other programs before i started using dd exclusively. i always went ahead and rewrote my live usb's if they didn't behave correctly. that always worked.

in case that doesn't work or you have already tried, can you run to see if it will shed some light on where things might have gotten stuck? i read a similar post that said dmesg wasn't scrollable in busybox and that didn't work so i'm not sure how much you will be able to see, but maybe there will be some useful info. another way to break it down would be to only check errors or warnings with or if all else fails, there is the option to redirect dmesg into a file with and read that file on a different machine if you have one available.

I haven't looked at bodhi in years, but it looks like it still supports changing the boot options on the livecd. Hightlight the "live" option and hit the "Tab" key - this will list the options; using the arrow keys go along to where it says "quiet splash" and delete both words (only).
Hit <Ctrl>-x to boot (don't hit enter).
Let's see the last messages before you drop into busybox - take a photo and post that if you have to.

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This is what I get when booting Bodhi 5:



@cordx
thanks for the tip.
dmesg gives at least half a dozen screenfulls that scroll by at high speed.
Sending it to a file is fine, but it's Live, without persistence.
I did try anyways, but a search via my other system found no such matching filename.
I did film it, so if you want to take a look and try pausing, be my guest.
Note, the link only works for 10 downloads. So anyone just casually browsing and not going to get involved in debugging this, do NOT download the file.
dmesg video. Expires after 10 downloads.

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FYI Ctrl+X did nothing, needed [enter] instead.

I'm going to have to do the same for you as for @cordx and upload a video as there is just too much going on in too short a time.

This should allow you to pause on the parts that interest you. I stopped filming because it was just redundant but am posting a photo of the end.
Video Bodhi 5 Legacy with quiet splash removed. Expires after 10 downloads (171MB)




Hopefully this can help the developers figure out what is wrong.
Don't go out of your way for me - as I am leaning towards Sparky now.
I doubt this will be resolved soon, and I need to move on to other things (you know, life).
Thanks everyone for your attempted help.

Cheers!

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what happens if you type exit at that prompt?

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Sorry, my bad re <Enter> - those were instructions for an already installed bootloader, not the liveCD.
I'm go look if I still have any 32-bit systems and test if so.

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i hadn't considered the live aspect when recommending the redirect. i was too busy trying to figure a way around not being able to use more or less and of course it worked just fine on my actual install when i ran it to check

i will take a look at the video and see if i can spot anything of interest. @rbtylee is one of the devs so i am hoping you can get some good help. i did see your comment about leaning towards sparky and understand wanting to just use something that works. good luck finding you like

you were all too right about so much going on in a short amount of time. the only two frames that weren't info mashed on top of other info were the first and last. all i could make out in the middle was what looked like normal system startup. so the last one with "FAT-fs: IO charset ascii not found" was all that really stuck out. the fact that it kept repeating at the end would seem to suggest that might be where everything got stuck and threw a fatal error.

a quick duckduck search didn't shed any particular light on the issue. there is debian bug report from 2017 citing the same error trying to boot live with kernel 4.7.0 (yours is 4.9 like my legacy install), but the stated fix was just that the issue was resolved in a later kernel. no real help there i know. just figured i would share what i found in case it might be of interest.

As I encounter same issue on old computer 32 bits (no PAE), I can investigated. Next soon.
Edit 1: live usb made with multibootusb fail to boot, even from menu 1 or menu 2 (old grub2).
Edit 2: successful boot if live usb made with "Startup disk creator"

I had similar issue with 5.0 legacy and not 4.5 legacy. Both of them I wrote fine with rufus for windows, but 5.0 wouldn't boot unless I used the 'dd' mode. Now I just always use dd (under linux) or dd mode if I'm using windows rufus and seems to work for everything. Rufus says something about to use dd mode if iso mode or whatever the normal mode is called doesn't boot right.

not sure about relevance. tried the 32 on an old mac - worked great live and supers fast compared to anything else i ran but when i installed it would not boot. so i installed debian back on it. (I read somewhere that debian at boot/install has a choice of 2 different boot choices. maybe the first time i left it default and that may keep other os's from booting. not sure but i may have chosen the other option second install. Not sure but after trying various things on this old macbook - i went back to the original experiment in debian lxde.) Never figured out why on install it would not boot. and also there was another xfce version of something that ran live but not boot. they were all dvd installs.) maybe a connection here. yes it was legacy bodhi and 32 bit other versions too.