Trying to install Pop OS on my laptop. It is an ASUS FX 505DY, with a ryzen 5 and RX 560X gpu. Made a bootable USB with Rufus on my desktop running windows. In my laptop's BIOS, I have set SVM disabled, SATA configuration to AHCI, fast boot and secure boot are disabled. In Rufus, I have tried both DD and ISO modes, partition scheme MBR as well as GPT.

My laptop came with Windows 10 pre installed, and I was able to boot into Pop OS from the USB stick, where the desktop would load. The installer came up but would freeze as soon as I chose a language instead of showing hard drive locations to install. After some time the force close dialogue will pop up for the install window. The rest of the desktop environment would remain responsive, unless I used file explorer to view the contents of the NVMe SSD, where it would load for a minute and then the whole machine would freeze. The NVMe SSD is the only hard drive in this machine.

I thought it might have been a problem with the way the hard drive was configured from the factory, so I used a Windows 10 boot drive to erase all partitions into un-allocated space. The installer still freezes at the exact same place but now I am unable to see the SSD at all in the file explorer.

I'm pulling my hair out here trying to understand what I need to do. Help would be much appreciated.

Have you tried another distro to see whether this is Pop!_OS specific?

Have you tried accessing the SSD from the live distro without starting to install it?

Please provide more details about the SSD (make & model).

1 members found this post helpful.

It says on their site it encrypts the install partition by default- I wonder if this may have something to do with it??
Probably not- what installer is it using? their own? Calamares? or official debian?