I have recently bought the Asrock board but am having great difficulty getting Linux to install on it.

Live USB images work, mostly, but when installed they are unusable as loses keyboard sometimes and mouse clicks. Mouse stilll moves around.

Tried Debian Live 9.3 and network install 9.4 also PCLinuxOS 12-2017. Both Debians installed wth mouse and keyboard working but when booted to installation not usable. The PClinux only works live in safe mode or it has no mouse or keyboard when running from USB stick. Didn't work from install also.

I bought board as it has triple monitor capblility but that also oesn't work with Linux at all. Also had trouble with the use of usb hard drives plugged into a usb hub - the mouse operation gets even worse. One time even stopped the board booting!!!.

There is no problem with the board as I sent it back and it was returned with windows on it and three monitors worked.

Anybody any suggestions?

Kwill

Can you try a most recent distro like Ubuntu 18.04?

i would start with a search phrase like this.
it looks like there's some good reading material for you.

You might have to use Debian testing for that board.

Hi, sorry for delay, life tends to get in the way.


I had another go with PCLinuxOS and with it live after about 20 seconds the second monitor came on!!. It installed with a few problems, installed grub to the usb stick not hard drive. Booted O.K. but from the Debian boot menu Still few problems though, somewhere it lost the user password Fixed that and was going well but now has stuffed up again. I can have windows open on one monitor or on the other monitor not sure why it decided to do this.

I think I will wipe both PClinuxOS and Debian and start again from scratch. Maybe try Ubuntu instead of Debian.

I always like dual boot as it can be very helpfull when disaster strikes.

Kwill

Hi everyone.


Finally had time to work on this problem.

PCLinuxOS installed and works, mostly! No usb hubs work and grub (grub2 or grub legacy) insisted on installing to the USB stick still. The two monitors work but while it is quite a time since I last had dual monitors I thought they were independant, on this the two monitors act as one screen (desktop). That is why I couldn't get two windows (applications) to show at same time, they were on different screens (desktops).


Haven't had chance to try installing Debian again yet.


This is first UEFI board I have had and wonder if that is problem with Grub? Another posibilty is that the hard driive is not partitioned as it used to be with 4 primary partions and any others as logical partitions in an extended partion. This has 7 partitions on 1T disk. Gparted says it has gpt partition table.

Should I perhaps try to reformat with MSDOS partition table?


Addition/Correction

Had been putting in suspend mode when not needed but last night shut it down completely, now it will not boot other than as live from the USB stick. Every other way I have tried either does nothing - boot fron /dev/sda (cursor goes down a couple of lines then nada) or starts to load but then goes into kernel panic and stops -unable to find root partition.


Looks like I will have to put some other OS on and hope that will get Grub to install properly.

I'm sorry you're having such problems. A casual observation I've made is that a lot of Ryzen boards need some time to pass until the Linux developers can catch up with the new features. But just make sure you're using the amd64 version of the installer.

Need to get grub installed somehow.

Tried every thing I could find online to get grub to install. Systemrescue USB - no go, neither the PCLinOS or Debian live USB sticks would work as corrupted.

I had to reload Debian on the usb stick to get it to boot live. It was tricky to get it to delete data and then try to install a new partition table. However the USB stick has now lost about half its storage when formatted to Fat32. Says 7.1Gb - it's a 16Gb drive. Something to do with the iso9660 system that gets put on when you 'dd' the *.iso.

First I had to install grub then grub2 to the USB stick as Debian 9.3.0 Live doesn't have them installed.

Grub legacy won't install to (hd0,0) as it is a EFI type disk with gpt partition. Just doesn't recognise (hd0,0) will only install to USB stick /dev/sdb (hd1,0)

Grub2 which should fix the problem of grub-legacy won't install either, gives error cannot find 'overlay' No idea what that is.

I am going to put a second hard drive in (4T) so will do that and see if I can install grub to that. If not then redo existing hard drive with MSDOS partion table.


Looks like I will be scrapping this board and trying something older with a pci video card as well as on board video. That is what you get for trying to avoid the Wind$ws tax on assembled systems. Should have picked a computer with Wind$ws on it at bigger price, it would be more likely to work and saved time I have wasted.

If PCLinuxOS is like other distros, you need a different grub2 for UEFI with GPT. In openSUSE 42.3 it's grub2-x86_64-efi.

You can convert MBR<>GPT.

Hi, update time.

I have twice previously tried to update but not sure what happened.

Basically nothing I can find/do seems to get PCLinuxOS to install grub on this board. So re-installed both PCLinuxOS and Debian but Debian only gave me choice of installing grub2 to the EFI partiition this time. I have had PCLinuxOS running on a USB hard disk but could not find any way of getting grub to install on internal hard drive.

So currently booting PClinuxOS from Debian menu. It would be nice if I could set it as default but haven't yet found a way. Apart from very slow boot - it waits 1 minute for the sda1 and sda5 partitions then times out. Very wierd as it is running on sda1 and sda5 is swap.

Any thooughts on speeding up?

Went to try sound and nadda only sound system available is dummy, others are greyed out. not even a usb sound dondle would work, it shows with lsusb but does not show in the kde sound mixer.

Any suggestions?

I have no idea why PCLinuxOS will work on both monitors but Debian will not nor why Debian will install a useable grub but PCLinuxOS won't.

Warning to others do not buy thiss board.

Thanks kwill

andwould be places to start looking for reasons for the timeouts. What timeout messages do you get, any details? What doshow and what are the corresponding entries for sda1 & sda5 in /etc/fstab?

Take a look at /etc/grub.d/*custom & README, and /etc/default/grub's GRUB_DEFAULT= for changing the boot time default. I mv /etc/grub.d/40_custom to 07_custom to make my personally created custom.cfg file take precedence at boot time.

FWIW, which I know won't help OP now, but I bought my first and last Asrock in Nov 2007. It was never anything but a test device, so had low total hours over its installed life. It had to be replaced under warranty the first year, and in July 2014 it died.

I figured out cause. When I installed Debian it gave the swap partition a new UUID. I should have realised as the swap partition didn't show so I changed fstab to use /dev/sda5 rather than UUID .


However I cannot manage to get it correct. All have managed is to stuff up Debian so it won't boot and PCLinuxOS is still stopping for a minute.

Tried update-grub2 in PCLinuxOS that didn't work tried the same in Debian again it didn't fix. So changed the grub.cfg file (O.K. not supposed to) to set the correct UUID first in the PCLinuxOS file then after that didn't work in the Debian file. As it hasn't worked I think it must be in the EFI partition on motherbaord where Debian put its version of grub2 boot info. It goes to the UEFI before it booots since Debian put it's grub to EFI.


So using the USB drive, save the PCLinuxOS partition with dd to .img file then clear the internal hard drive, install a MSDOS partition table on it, repartition as before then put the .img file back and hope I can get grub to install to the internal hard drive.

By the way systemd-analyze command doesn't seem to exist.

Maybe try this:

add a volume label to swap
change both fstabs to mount by label
replace resume=blah with noresume on the kernel cmdlines
optionally change the fstabs to mount everything by label

A USB external HD might be assigned resources by the kernels and Grub(s) in different order, especially when more than one kernel version is involved, so at some point during the entire boot process sda and sdb could be being swapped. UUIDs are supposed to avoid that problem, but bugs....

None of my hundreds of filesystems mount by or are found by Grub via UUID.

In both Debian and PCLOS? Could it be spelled systemd-analyse in your locale?

this is why i always use UUIDs.
fixing the swap partition's UUID in fstab after installation of a second OS is trivial.