Installation Fails to advance to Disk Setup on ASUS R501VM Laptop

[NoWorries]

I have recently purchased an ASUS R501VM N56VM Core i7 3610QM 16GB 750GB 2G GT630M BluRay 15.6" Gaming Laptop. It has Windows 7 pre-installed and when I start the installation process, I can do Language > Prepare but when I attempt to go to the next step of Disk Setup I get a rotating cursor and the laptop disk light comes on for about 2s and then stays off. The build that I am using is: raring-desktop-amd64.iso 11-Dec-2012. The build for the 9-Dec-2012 had the same problem.

I have been successful at installing 12.10 by using the defaults. The BIOS for the Laptop has the option to Disable UEFI Boot. When I tried the Disable option there was no Grub menu and Kubuntu 12.10 could not be started. I now have UEFI Boot enabled.

In the various options I have been trying, I have had to reinstall Windows 7. I was so surprised to see such an archaic installer and the process took of the order of 2 1/2 hours!!!!! While I was experiencing this process for the first time I couldn't but smile at the ASUS promotion: Inspiring Innovation - Persistent Perfection .

I enjoy the Inspiring Innovation - Persistent Perfection of the Kubuntu Team and look forward to this problem being fixed .

[GerardV]

I downloaded and installed it on a Toshiba L750 on a VM on 12.10. And apart from the language selection, there was no feedback at all, only a black screen untill the install was finished and re-started. I installed it from a .iso on a SSD so there is no sound from a spinning cd or hdd, only a very faint hdd led flashing every now and then. But it installed ok. I suppose if you don't get any hdd activity, then maybe something did go wrong. It is in the beta stage after all.

I had to install win7 from a partition when i bought the laptop, and the 64 bit version did take about 2 hours with 5 or 6 re-starts. It drove me mad ! So maybe that is not unusual.

[OneLine]

..It is in the beta stage after all...

Early alpha - beta will be /1/

2013 March 14th Beta1Release (for opt-in flavors)

http://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2012/12/10...ntu-devel.html

xnox ...there have been multiple reports recently of "hanging installs"... 17:52

A bug report: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...y/+bug/1085991


Links:

1. https://wiki.kubuntu.org/RaringRingtail/ReleaseSchedule


More links:

- http://www.kubuntuforums.net/showthr...aring-Ringtail
- http://www.kubuntuforums.net/showthr...e-to-test-well!

[NoWorries]

Thanks for that. Looks like I will have to check about every week to see if the problem is fixed. I managed to install 13.04 on a Compaq All-in-One and I am very impressed with the alpha so far .

The only problem that I encountered with this system is that the Startup Disk Creator does not work. It gives the error message: An error occurred when talking to the udisks service.

[NoWorries]

My ASUS R501VM Laptop now advances to the Disk Setup and also the light behind each key is on as well. I have decided to not proceed with the installation tonight and hope that I can have a go tomorrow. I have another desktop with 13.04 installed and those applications that I require all work very well and I am VERY impressed with the current progress.

[oshunluvr]

To add to OneLine's info, the main bug in this regard is #1080701

[NoWorries]

Installation Completed Without a Problem

I am pleased to report that the installation went through without a hitch. I had to smile when I saw a screen saying that Kubuntu 12.10 was being installed during the installation.

The outstanding problems that I have to fix are:

1. Windows 7 does not boot.
2. The Ethernet connection is not recognized
3. I need to do more work to get my Keyboard Lights to work.

I have been successful in networking this Laptop with two other machines and all other applications that I use are installed and working well.

I was surprised that, as I have dual graphic cards, the Kinfocenter shows only the Nvidia Geforce card and not the Intel as well. So I did not need to worry about bumblebee or any other trick to use the Nvidia card.

[NoWorries]

Replaced disk with 256GB Samsung SSD 840 Pro --- 8.13s Boot Time

When I had the hard disk, I was able to solve the problem of being able to boot Windows 7 using boot-repair. To simplify grub editing I then used grub-customizer. I have this hard disk now in storage just in case I have problems before the warranty expires. I now have the SSD installed and the boot time with login disabled is 8.13 as shown in the attached graphic.

I was able to get the Sub-woofer to work by:

sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf 
Add, at the end of the file: options snd-hda-intel model=asus-mode4

I was able to get the keyboard backlights to work by:

sudo nano /etc/rc.local 
Before the exit 0 add the following lines:

echo 0x00050021 > /sys/kernel/debug/asus-nb-wmi/dev_id
echo 0x82 > /sys/kernel/debug/asus-nb-wmi/ctrl_param
cat /sys/kernel/debug/asus-nb-wmi/devs

I obtained all this information from other web pages and for brevity I just showed what I found to work for me.

For an Alpha2+ this is certainly a very impressive distribution.