At this point I'd try to get back to a blank system, just deleting partitions does not remove the table and you have potentially fallen in a BIOS/EFI/GPT/MBR mismatch hole from your firmware adventures (your symptoms suggest this, I think the MBR protection in GPT causes issues) checking sda is your 500Gb drive first:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=2
Reboot and reinstall with 'Erase Everything' in the partitioner.
If that doesn't work the next action is to delete tables again again as above, reboot and go into firmware, enable full legacy booting, and install again. the installer should choose MBR this time.
Nothing stopping you going for full legacy boot first round, but you must kill your GPT data with DD
These are the kind of issues that Microsoft created for us with UEFI, but that's another subject.
So, i'm back! Decided to go ahead and install Mint onto my G752. And, what would you expect, the same exact issue. But, now, i'm typing this on my phone. Because, well, my cough asus laptop is completely bricked. BIOS is fine, but the keyboard / touchpad locks out after POST. And, it goes into a boot loop. Sending in my laptop for RMA now. I thank you guys for helping, but, linux has not been successful for me, and the community doesn't have answers. If anyone has any more information please let me know.
I have rack, but it's my freenas box so, no testing on that. Definitely not going to touch that.
Dude... Download a completely different ISO. Youd be suprised how easy it is for a download or a flash to USB/DVD to go wrong and make the system uninstalable... I spent many an hour figuring that one out
Maybe you don't have the right mindset for after-market software, your approach is certainly strange, maybe you didn't connect the ribbon properly while you were checking the BIOS? why did you even check the BIOS physically? I've been doing all sorts of stuff for 20 years and that's not something I really consider doing.
Physically, on both machines, the chip was in tact.
Also, I don't have an O scope, or the know-how to properly check an IC.
I did try a different ISO previously, but I was running into the same issue, and tried another, and that's when I kept pushing for more troubleshooting after the first one didn't work properly. Right now, I'm out of commission. I only have my wife's laptop which she uses for work, and my cell phone.
