Hey all…
I’m quite frustrated. I want to finish my server…
the build is
Asrock Steel Legend b550m
Inwin EFS052 case with 450w
32gb 3000mhz cl14 tridentz memory
500gb wd black nvme ssd
Zotac 1080 ti (used for the GUI installs, will promptly be returned to gaming rig)
I’ve tried installing OpenSuse (installer image clips and I can’t continue)
Ubuntu server (crashes during install), Debian (crashes after install) and fedora (crashes during install)
These are a mixed bag of distros with a variety of kernels and A) none of them was able to recognize the Realtek Lan Device RTL8125B B) all have failed one way or the other.
Has anyone experienced something like this with B550m? I’ll install windows as a sanity check. But I don’t have any other GPU to swap out the 1080ti that otherwise works great on my gaming rig…
First things first: do a BIOS/CMOS reset on the board, check if there’s an updated BIOS and if so, install it. Do NOT overclock your system! Make sure the memory is installed in the correct slots. Check the BIOS settings for the NVMe disk to be the boot device as well as being able to boot from the device. (EUFI settings, IIRC)
If all else fails, use a standard SATA SSD to install Linux on via your gaming rig, transplant the SSD into your server and see if it’ll boot. After successful booting the system, see what else it needs.
Secure boot? nomodeset? Legacy or UEFI install? Is that 32GB 4 sticks or 2? I would try and install with 1 stick in the appropriate slot as per the manual and lower the RAM to below advertised frequency. After clearing CMOS as per above.
I’m still on my original BIOS on my ASRock B450 board, as well as every other machine I’ve owned, save for a pair of Socket A boards that many years back, so I would never recommend updating BIOS until all other avenues have been exhausted. If the problem isn’t the BIOS, and the update adds a new problem, it makes things substantially harder to figure out which thing is causing what problem. Breaking things down to the bare minimum needed to POST can also circumvent some BIOS related issues and help narrow down an issue between hardware and BIOS, at which point updating the board is the obvious answer.
Since Debian crashes after install you may want to play around with that next since there is the possibility of something going wrong with graphics. I don’t know if there are any settings pertaining to the new PCI-E 4 that might cause issues with that card on Linux.
Thankfully before I went to the heavy handed approaches. I found a solution…
I found out POP OS ships with Nvidia Graphic Drivers do I installed that and it miraculously worked. So It was a combination of PCIE 4 instability, and unsupported network card. All I had to to was manually install the RTL 8125B drivers and verified the 2.5G lan card worked.
All in all what an ordeal to what is usually a breeze… Unfortunately I got stuck with POP OS for what is meant to be a headless server. So once the distros catch up with the latest kernels and I am able to get perhaps an AMD card I’ll be more than happy to switch to openSuse or Ubuntu server…
Thanks for the reply, I can happily attest I got it working and at least this comment served me to not lose my mind. After knowing. I could do the transplant I calmed a bit and thinked with a cool head for a bit. Realized it was probably the gpu. I tried POP OS which has the option to create an image with Nvidia or AMD gpu drivers and it installed like there was never anything wrong. Probably also since they they ship with relatively new kernels (5.4 at this time when 5.8 is the latest LTS).
All in all this was the lan driver and GPU compounding each other in a almost undecipherable problem… I’m just glad my hardware and build are functioning and I can simply switch to openSuse later.