When trying to boot Centos 7 or Centos 8 USB sticks, I found that the installation would stop on the “Starting dracut initqueue hook” and then run the dracut initqueue stop. When you do get into the logs, you will find that this is because the system can’t find /dev/root …. It can’t see the USB stick as a “root” device.

In my case, it was because I used Windows Rufus to create the Centos 7 USB stick. Centos 7/8 act like DVD ISOs, so you need to load “Balena Etcher” and use Etcher to correctly create the bootable USB Stick.