If it were just one occasional disc or image, it would make sense.

POST is always good. Booting to the installed OS on the SSD is always fine too. Just the pre-installation boot from media. Weird.

I just wish I knew enough to find out what the issue is. I hate not knowing stuff. There are a lot of magazine coverdiscs with multiple distros on that fail too, so it's deffo not the img to flash burner that's the issue (I use Etcher on Arch). Still, i'll try a few more things and see if there's some kind of pattern emerges. It's not as if there's even any error feedback to go on. :-/

"POST is always good. Booting to the installed OS on the SSD is always fine too. Just the pre-installation boot from media. Weird."

The only thing I can think of based on that may be that your video is taking too much of your ram. Some installers need 1G free. It may be possible that if it knew there was some swap space it could continue.

Just haven't read any part of the thread that makes it clear as to the issue so far.

If it were 1 dodgy dvd drive it would make sense. And that box must be ≥7 years old.

It's after POST. I can choose the boot menu (HDD, CD, USB etc.) and then it's russian roulette time. Anything from a complete non-boot to crashing after the media menu. I just don't know how to "disect" a bootable medium to see how they differ. Any pointers as to what to read up on?

Yep. But it's a hardly used BDROM drive, and it's USB with exactly the same issues. Sure, the box is old now, that's why it's being used as an HTPC now, perfect for it.

You can loop mount an iso, but it's unlikely to further you. They all start with grub -->syslinux anyhow.

A better approach would be a usb key. Provided you have an iso you trust, and presuming your usb key is on sdb, unmount it and run Note it's wiping the partitions, so don't use your 1TB usb key with mission critical stuff on it - 4G or 8G is quite enough.If you're paranoid, check checksums.

I have a box with this same board and an AMD 3200+ -- and there is something cranky about it. USB boot with an Easy2Boot stick is so slow I thought it was hung (it eventually boots but takes several minutes, and even Puppy boots slowly, if at all). DVD boot is actually faster, which is bizarre, but it's still very slow compared to other systems.

For a while I had ReactOS on it but it will only speak to one build, now somewhat long in the tooth. Mint ran okay but had fatal GRUB issues (nuked itself when I looked at -- didn't change anything! -- video settings, and that was reproducible). I've about concluded it's too buggy for real use, tho whether it's the board or the CPU is uncertain (but AMD CPUs can have very weird bugs) ... one of these days I'll swap out the CPU for something faster and then we'll see.

Side note: some of these early AMD64 CPUs don't get along with NVidia vidcards; the conflict produces weird lockups in Windows, and I expect buggers up linux too. (It's definitely the CPU. Swap it for a 32bit CPU and the problem goes away.) I'm wondering if you've run into that.

This stuff is only coming out now, in post #23?:-o. Did you start the thread for a chat, or to solve a problem? If the latter, it's good to get relevant info out early.
Anyhow, on the cpu front, intel has had so little competition support is going to get bent around intel cpus/chipsets anyhow. In the early days, it was intel who had the iffiness, and amd were straight down the line, but that was a long time ago.

Was ignoring all the sniping between, then finally noticed the OP's board was the same as mine that's similarly goofy. Aha! a common factor. Here's my experience...

Another point occurs to me:

AMD had a problem back in the K6 era where the CPU claimed to be 32bit, but wasn't, not entirely. Windows would run anyway, albeit in 16bit mode, but linux would refuse to run at all. (Encountered this myself, and it's why I stopped buying AMD for clients.) Friend tracked it down and pestered an AMD engineer til he admitted it was a known issue, but AMD had chosen not to recall the chips.

Anyway, I'm wondering if something similar is going on with early AMD64 CPUs.

I've also seen a K6-2 450MHz just about grind to a halt or even lock up when confronted with Math (frex, the Tubes screensaver or the Dicewars flash game). Waaaaay slower than a P2-450 on the same tasks... in fact even my old P233 did better.

Back when AMD occasionally released an Errata sheet (which is to say, a list of the known bugs), it was typically 3x as long as Intel's. This was so even when they were still using Intel's code.

So frankly nothing weird from an AMD CPU surprises me (and I'm not a fan of the commonly-associated VIA chipset, either). LISB4, if they follow me home I'll use 'em (tho not for mission-critical), but I won't pay money for 'em.

Set bios to failsafe or the slowest settings maybe??

Nice to know someone else had issues! I had Mint on it before, which was fine as well. TBH, i've had other hardware that has had a similar isssues too, back when I only used Asus boards, but i've got round it somehow. Only this one has thrown this many hissy fits though.

I'd forgotten how bad compatibility between rival company's hardware used to be, but it's why i've used Intel chipped boards for ages now. Don't think i've got a 32bit CPU for that socket. I'm in the process of dumping about 20 years worth of old tech, so most of it's gone already. :-/

It's usually USB that I use (Etcher to write it), but again, it's not the physical medium, that is the problem.

Hmm. My experience is that it was Intel who came out with the most stable stuff. Business relied on it, so it had to be solid. And if there were issues, they got fixed.

Having suffered through the days of VIA, Cyrix, and AMD Irongate, and NVidia's crappy attempt at chipsets, I'm glad most of them have given up. Intel was always expensive, and slow originally, but at least it usually works.

CPUs keep getting more and more instructions. I suspect that yours is too old for current distros. Debian is always the safe-ist bet for me on things like this. They offer alternative kernels that'll cope with reduced opcode CPUs (aka OLD). Modern CPUs have virtualization and other extras. There's generally ways to force things to work, assuming at least one working linux to do "tricks" in. It's always easier when you have more than one computer. The nice thing about linux is that you can boot from pretty much ANY bootable device, usb, cd, dvd, hdd, network, whatever. Which gives you "options". I was still using my athlon x2 in 2009, but sadly haven't booted that in recent history. I like modern low power things and my room 10F cooler than it used to be.