ASUS F1A 55-M LE 12.04 installer crashes

[Peter09]

Yesterday my Son bought a new machine to me so that I could assist in installing 12.04. The machine has no O/S installed and is a basic ASUS F1A 55-M LE motherboard, nothing else installed except 4GB of memory.

We tried to install 12.04 (64 bit) using flash drives and also a CD.

Initially we could get nothing but a blank screen, but using 'nomodeset' in the grub command line allowed the Live CD to run OK.

Trying to install resulted in an installer crash - every time :( about 3/4 of the way through (during a section talking about transferring settings).

This also occurred on the Alternate text based installer.

Can anyone suggest any options here?

[lJ9%3MR>sa]

I'm having similar problems on an older computer I have with only 1gb of ram. The installer of any Lubuntu, Xubuntu, etc... Will crash at 50% and go to live desktop. I think it has to do with AMD CPUs or something. I hope they release a fix.:p

[Peter09]

Well, over the weekend I tried installing 11.10, with an aim to upgrade to 12.04.

LiveCD ran OK, (needed the boot option of 'nomodeset'), and gave me a working desktop - great. The install also went OK, no issues or crashes. Looking Good.

On trying to boot the installed system, :(, failure. Something to do with the on-board radion graphics, the system stalls at UserSplash (or at checking battery......)

Its a bit annoying that the LiveCD works but the install does not. Currently, despite trawling the internet - no resolution.

[haresear]

I assume you tried using the "nomodeset" boot option when trying to boot the installed system? It sure sounds like a video driver problem.

[Peter09]

Yes, tried




nomodeset,
acpi=off
xforcevesa


at some point in the precedings, plus combinations of all.

[haresear]

Is recovery mode available in the grub boot menu, and have you tried that?

[Peter09]

Yes,
can get to the root prompt (without the network) - thats because its a wireless connection. Could go hardwired if needed.

Doing:-



lspci -C video


shows the video card as 'unclaimed'

[haresear]

Sounds like it isn't loading the correct graphics driver. I haven't dealt with an ATI graphics problem for quite a long time, so I'm not that familiar with recent drivers. The last ATI card I had used the driver module 'radeon' -- not sure if that is still relevant. If you boot with the live CD again and use 'lsmod' in a terminal, you might get a clue for a graphics driver module that will work. If you can figure out what driver module you need, you might be able to force it to load with a boot parameter. Years ago I was able to load a particular graphics driver with the boot parameter 'xmodule=xxxxx'. Not sure if this parameter still works or not. Sorry I can't be more help -- maybe someone more knowledgeable will chime in soon.

[Peter09]

Thanks I'll try it when I get home.

[Peter09]

Solved it:

yesterday when I booted the system it came up to the command prompt WITH NETWORKING, this allowed me to try



sudo apt-get install fglrx


that installed a large number of additional items. Next boot it worked, no problem. I then upgraded to 12.04 and - yes its there.

Obviously for some reason the installer does not recognise that there is a Radeon card onboard.

Thanks to everyone for help and assistance.

[haresear]

Great. Glad to hear you got it sorted out.