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I'm assembling a computer to use as an HTPC/small home server. Here's the hardware I have:

Motherboard Asrock FM2A88X-ITX+
CPU AMD A10-7700K (3.5GHz) Black Edition
RAM Kingston 2x4GB DD3 1600MHz HyperX Blu

Other than that I'm connecting with HDMI to my 50" Panasonic Led TV, using an Apple USB keyboard and a cheap USB mouse. I don't remember the brand of the power supply but it's a standard ATX 500W.

I have been trying to install Ubuntu from a USB stick (8GB). At first I had a lot of issues because it would fail when installing GRUB. Then I managed to install CentOS 6.5 (actually the only one that succeeded until now), and then after that I did manage to install Ubuntu 13.10. The last version would also fail.

To create the live USB stick I tried UNetbootin for Mac and Universal USB Installer for Windows.

Either way, when booting I have to add the "nomodeset" option to the boot parameters otherwise I don't even get to the installer. So that works, the installer doesn't complain and at the end it reboots. When Ubuntu starts booting I see a purple screen and then the screen flickers with some white noise until it settles on a black screen with a prompt on the top left corner.

I figured this must be the "nomodeset" option which is not enabled for the newly installed system. SO I boot with the live USB into "try" mode and edit the file /etc/default/grub and I add "nomodeset" to the line GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash.

This didn't help though. From all I read around the web (and lots of posts in askubuntu) this is related to the graphics card (in my case Radeon R7).

Then I tried changing splash to nosplash to see more details in the boot sequence. I didn't see much more but I did see that it crashed on a blackscreen with the following error:

usb 4-5: string descriptor 0 read error: -22

Searching in google for this doesn't help at all. It might have something to do with a faulty USB component, but I even tried disconnecting everything before booting, same results. Then I thought it might be the 2 USB3 inputs the motherboard has so I disabled USB3 in the BIOS just to be sure, still nothing.

What else can I try? It's quite frustrating to have shiny new components and not being able to install a simple Linux distribution on it.

Thanks!

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