Asus M4A785RD-V EVO Motherboard, AMI Bios, latest (2103)
AMD Athlon II X2 250 Processor, 3GHz
2x 1GB DDR3, 1333MHz, CAS9 RAM, in dual channel mode, usuable size 1792MB due to
Onboard ATI Radeon HD 4200 Graphics, using DVI output

Was using a 1TB Western Digital SATA WD10EARS-00Y5B1 Hard Drive
but due to it being Advanced Format (4096-byte sectors), for the installation have switched to a
120GB Maxtor IDE 6Y120L0 Hard Drive as a slave to the DVD Drive


I've been trying to install any form of linux on this system for 4 days now
I've had no luck with any disto or architecture, aiming for Fedora 12/13 x86_64

'Live' discs boot and run happily.
Linux installed on the hard drive in an Intel/DDR2 machine and moved across runs fine the first time then fails on next boot.
Windows 7 Professsional 64-bit installed and ran fine but that's not a lot of good to me

Enabling/Disabling ACPI (bios or boot options) didn't seem to help


Here are the log files from an attempt
Installing MythDora 12.23
Windows was already on the drive in this instance

--- link to logs removed (they're not there anymore) ---

* X.log
* anaconda.log
* program.log
* storage.log
* syslog ------- lots of segfaults at the end
* yum.log


I would be most grateful to anyone who can help me get it running or understand why it won't.
Do ask for any information you might need that I've missed from here

Do you have a spare standard format sata drive around you can use for the installation? Motherboard manufacturers are now all using third parties to supply their ide controller chipsets and some have very poor support in the present linux kernel. I've seen some ide controller chipsets that will only operate ide hard drives in PIO mode on recent linux kernels and even then you get a lot of I/O errors. It may be what you are running into.

Thanks. I'll have a look but I have a feeling I don't. I'm moving some files to clear one at the moment (at least enough to partition it).

Boot to a ultimate boot cd and use hd tests maybe.

Check any cables. If suspect replace with high quality cables.

Set bios settings to failsafe or other basic and slow settings. May have to choose optimal.

One point is this. Almost no machine is ever factory tested on linux. All companies use windows. Just because windows works doesn't mean that this system will work correctly with linux. I used to work at big computer place and we would get some runs of a single chip from some supplier. Every other part would work fine but a version changed where one OS would work and one would not. Because linux uses the system in a different way you can't assume because MS works then so will linux.

kilgoretrout, same failure with a sata drive unfortunately, I was rather hoping that would work.

jefro, thanks for the suggestions
Hard drives are fine, I've run them all through testing.
Yup, tried different cables.
I've tried enabling/disabling many bios settings.
I was prepared to accept it was the hardware but if that's the case why do LiveCDs work, and why does a pre-installed linux on a hard drive work the first time it is booted in this machine?
I don't want to just buy all new hardware unnecessarily if its just new ram (which tested as fine), or a new motherboard etc that I need.

If you haven't done so already, try running memtest on your ram just to rule that out as a problem. As jethro noted, I've also seen inconsistent behavior with linux and windows with dodgey ram. Also, try running with just one ram stick at a time. Boot up with a livecd and post the output of:

$ lspci

That will give a better idea of the hardware environment and the various chipsets on your motherboard.

Edit: I assume you are not OCing this thing. If you are, set the timings back to normal.

It boots with either stick of ram, and memtest said there were no problems

Also, I don't tend to overclock these days, and as far as I know the built in oc'ing is disabled.. actually here is the output from lspci, I'm going to check that it is actually disabled and not set to 'auto'.
[ edit : it was on auto, isn't now so I'll try another install ]

[ edit : SATA controller was in AHCI mode when I did this, its usually in IDE mode (I was just playing with settings) ]

--- link removed (they're not there anymore) ---


_____[ edit ]_______________________________________________


It works! It appears the solution was to set the overclock options from 'auto' to 'manual'. Even though 'Overclock by x%' was set to none.

So thank you kilgoretrout and jefro, you've solved it


_____[ much later edit ]____________________________________

To anyone that is here due to a similar issue (you never know):

It didn't work - it may have installed but by the second reboot it was once again dead.

I spent weeks trying different settings, manually entering all the frequencies and timings, different RAM, different switches, disabling the built-in graphics, technical support from place of purchase (ASUS never got back to me), just about every major distro and architecture under the sun,..

In the end I bought a different, cheaper motherboard by MSI, different NB and SB chipsets to the ASUS one, put the original RAM in, processor, new thermal paste.. and it worked. It just worked.

Maybe that particular ASUS motherboard was a dodgy and Windows was just hiding it, either way, it used the AMD 785G and SB710 chipsets if you want to avoid them and see if it helps.


About the original problem:
Sometimes the install would get as far as copying all the files, and die at the last percent
Sometimes it would die during the 'write changes to disk', either part way through or right at the beginning. To get through this, clearing the drive helped, the following command was useful but it does literally wipe the drive so don't have anything you want to lose on it
switch to a console CTRL+ALT+2, or 3 or 4..

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1M

obviously substitute /dev/sda with your hard drive. I could get all the files installed but GRUB was definately a no-go.


Apologies about there being no solution here, but at least it might make it easier to accept it could be the motherboard, not the RAM or hard drive or so. Trust me - £45 for a new motherboard is a damn sight cheaper than wasting 4 months re-re-...re-re-installing Linux