abit motherboard not working with any linux
 

hello, i own a motherboard abit i-45cv and cannot install any linux at all! i am a pretty experienced one, started from red hat 6.0.
i tried with ubuntu 8.04, knoppix 5.1, opensuse 11 either live or alternate installation and they all hang at the very beginning of installation: udev probing for knoppix, more or less same stage for ubuntu, i have to cold reboot.

i searched for my motherboard and nobody seems have my problems, and i know abit is (or was) almost linux compatible. any help please?

One problem I have noticed with my abit board and almost every distro is I have to use the noapic switch for the kernel. I don't know if that is your trouble or not, but it has been a bit of a pain for me.

Good luck.

What kind of memory do you have installed. I have had to disable "report memory errors" to get some motherboards to boot.

cannot install any linux
 

hi thanks for answer
here i posted some pics
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...ht=abit+i-45cv

you can take a look at what's going on during installation
i tried linux acpi=off as well, i'll try noapic and i'll see

The pictures are useful, have you tried running memtest86 on it to see if the RAM is ok ?

hi thanks for answer
i not tried yet the mem test, but windows xp is actually running on the same machine and it is working, perfectly (what a pity! after 8 years of linux!! :-(

i tried to install with linux noapic but no luck
may i call linus?

All I see are modules crashing. This could mean that the ISO file that you wrote to disk is corrupted or the integrity of the image is OK and it has been written to disk to fast. Writing to a recordable optical disc too fast does include a lot of errors because the high RPM speed warps the disc causing the pits to be very distorted. Write at the lowest speed possible and do a checksum of the ISO file.

I suggest adding a PCIe graphics card and turn off on-board video to separate the memory problem issue. Also disable communication ports, USB, audio, NIC, and SATA in the BIOS. I suggest use Knoppix to just boot into runlevel 3 with out framebuffer. If it boots fine, then enable the NIC and try to use link or links to look up a web page. Enable each device one by one until a problem occurs.

These days, computers are getting too dependent with Windows. I suggest do a cold boot. This means completely power down and boot up to Linux.

In the BIOS, set IRQ to be assigned by the BIOS. Set Fail-Safe settings and then check processor and memory specs. The voltage for DDR2 memory should be at 1.8 volts. If it is higher like 2.0 volts, you are using memory that is over clocked. I suggest set FSB to 667 MHz or 800 MHz and the memory at 667 MHz. Anything you changed in the BIOS will affect Windows. Before you set Fail-Safe settings and change any setting in the BIOS, note every setting to have something you can refer to when booting into Windows. Windows is very whiny OS, so note everything.

If all else fails, update the BIOS.

SOLVED!
i'm actually writing from my gOS - ubuntu with everything going smoothly, except for xp! what i did:
in the bios
-i changed from sata 1 to sata 4
-i excluded internal video card
-i used a normal -non usb - keyboard (actually the system booted the same)
and every flavour of linux finally started to boot, thanks for every answer you gave me (esp Electro)
as a user told me xp now refuses to start, even if i put back sata and bios, just for test, but at the moment i don't care, we'll see if i need it anymore

Odd to see all the problems.

All three of my boxes has Abit boards (my preferred brand) for various chips and I've experienced no problems what-so-ever with several distros.