Problem installing OS

Oct 28, 2018
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I'm putting together a new system, but I can't install the OS. My system is based on Ryzen 7 2700X, Gigabyte X470 motherboard, 16 GB Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 on 2 sticks, and a MSI GeForce GTX1060 6 GB and SP SSD, both of which I salvaged from another system and are known good.

I can't install any OS. I tried both Windows 10 Home and Ubuntu 18.04. In both cases the OS installer hangs on loading. This is with barebones hardware, just MB, CPU, memory, video card, SSD, keyboard and mouse. I'm guessing this is a defective hardware issue, but which? CPU, RAM or motherboard? How do I solve this mystery?
 
Perhaps it's none of that. It might just be the media on which your installer is stored. If that is an optical drive or disc, try using a USB flash drive. If it's a USB flash drive, try an optical disc or a different flash drive.

Also, it's probably worth completely resetting the CMOS/BIOS with ALL of the hardware actually connected to the system by unplugging power from the wall and removing the CMOS battery for a full five minutes. During that five minutes press the power button for 30 seconds. When the five minutes is up, reinstall the CMOS battery, plug the power back in to the wall, boot into the bios and reconfigure your storage devices as to boot order etc.

It's also possible you might need to disable CSM (Compatibiity support module) and enable UEFI boot mode, in the bios, and then try to reinstall.

Very unlikely that the memory or CPU would cause any problems during installation of the OS if they work fine in pre-windows environments, but always possible. Might also be a good idea to pull the CPU and make sure there are no bent pins. Bent pins can be very tricky as the system can seem to work fine in many areas and then fail entirely or partially when something makes a call or uses the pin or pins that are bent on the CPU or motherboard. It's also very easy to do, I've even seen veteran builders get in a hurry and do it.

Also, make sure the SSD is attached to the SATA port/header on the motherboard with the lowest number, 0 or 1 depending on board model. If it is, try another header to see if maybe there is a storage controller or PCI lane issue.

At WHAT point during the installation does it hang?
 
Oct 28, 2018
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Thanks for the suggestions. I should have added more detail. I haven't touched the BIOS except to set the boot device. I used two different USB flash drives, one for Windows and one for Linux. Both failed. I haven't tried an optical disk. I will try that next. I did reseat the memory, but no help. I will look at the CPU pins.

The memory, CPU and MB are all brand new. The video card and SSD have been previously used. For all installations I tried I have used UEFI since that's the only option I'm presented with to boot from the USB stick. I will try disabling CSM. The SSD is attached to port 0 on the MB. I will try a different port.

On Windows, the first time the installer hung on the first restart on the splashscreen. The second time it hung during the initial file copying. With Ubuntu it hung on the splashscreen before I did anything.