Motherboard

Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD4P
http://www.giga-byte.com/Products/Mo...e=GA-EX58-UD4P

North Bridge:
Intel X58 Express Chipset

South Bridge:
Intel ICH10R

Audio:
Realtek ALC889A codec
High Definition Audio

LAN:
Realtek 8111D chip

Storage:
SATA


CPU

Intel i7 920


Video Card
NVIDIA - GeForce GTX 260


I can boot from a live CD and all is well, but when I go to install it fails, and even if it does seem to install, it refuses to boot. I've tried many 32 and 64 bit distros, but all fail. Windows XP 32 bit and Vista 64 bit work perfectly.

I suspect that it may have something to do with the either the North Bridge chipset, South Bridge chipset, or both, but most likely the South Bridge storage management (IDE/SATA), but I'm not sure. I suspect that the Linux kernel is not communicating with my chipset I/O.

I'm not a very experienced Linux user, but I have successfully installed and operated Linux on older systems. I have to assume that the current Linux kernel does not support these current computer technologies, because on the older systems Linux installed and worked fine.

Any help with this will be much appreciated!

If you can run it as a liveCD then I doubt it's the chipset. Can you post detailed info on what happens or doesn't happen when you boot. Post exact and detailed error messages that you see (if any) here to this thread. Which distro(s) have you successfully installed?

Assuming that you are trying to install something that is of a more recent vintage than the X58/i7 (which aren't that old, really), then the next thing is to ensure that you are only using ports provided by the chipset.

That gigabyte board has not only mass storage interface ports provided by the Intel chipset, but there are extra ports provided by a Gigabyte chip (who knows whether it is really a Gigabyte chip? it could really be a Jmicron, Promise, etc, etc, chip, but it will probably be branded Gigabyte and referred to in the manual as Gigabyte).

Support for the X58/ICH10R is almost certainly there in the most recent releases, but that Gigabyte chip may not be supported and it may not be autodetected. (BTW, I wouldn't be using the R bit, either, but then I regard the cheap raid solutions with some suspicion...but then I don't have any experience with the more recent Intel raid chips, which may have improved by now, but certainly some of the early, third-party, raid chips were less than perfect).

I just installed SUSE 11.1 64 bit on my i7 920 system. MB is an ASUS P6T Deluxe V2 and memory is 12Gb, 2 * CORSAIR DOMINATOR 6GB (3 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800). Video is an ASUS EN9600GT card. HD is a Western Digital VelociRaptor WD1500HLFS 150GB.

Install went ok, runs perfectly. No glitches except for a stuttering sound card which I solved from this thread: www<dot>linuxquestions<dot>org/questions/susenovell-60/sound-card-issues-in-opensuse-11.0-and-11.1-x8664-versions-702972/

By restarting the sound demon (as root):rcalsasound restart

All in all it is more stable than my previous xeon system (I blame SUSE 11.0 with a KDE 4.0).

So it can't be the chipset. I had no problems there. The only problem I had was with booting. The first time went ok, set the time and date, the next boot it just hung. After resetting the cmos it would boot again, ask to set the date and time etc... I reset the bootup screen to show POST messages, I set Express Gate (Instant-on environment?) to disabled, and Suspend mode to S1 (POS) only. No problems booting anymore. No problems installing / starting up / running

I agree with salasi check what SATA ports your drive is connected to. If they are RAID ports, or third party chip try plugging the drive into different SATA ports for th install, or check the BIOS for the MODE of the SATA port (RAID/ACPI/etc..)

Download the supergrub boot disk, and after your 'seemingly successful install that fails to boot' boot from the supergrub disk and see if it can boot the installed system. if it can, then that would provide a pretty good pointer to where the issue lies.

(I had to do this for a recent install that failed to install GRUB on the MBR during the install process, after getting the system to boot it was trivial to get grub installed and then everything magically worked.)