In order to load and run Leap (all versions) on the Gigabyte GA-78LMT-USB3 motherboard at all I’ve had to disable the MCE in the kernel parameters both during installation and as part of normal running of the OS. The problem, as far as I can determine is that this old-school BIOS does not have a means for the user to disable the floppy interface regardless of whether there is hardware attached to it. It stalls out the boot process and looks like a hardware failure to MCE. Disabling MCE allows the kernel to ignore the problem. It still took me 7 tries (I am persistent, at least) to install the current iteration of Leap on this system but most of the issues were related to getting video from the NVIDIA GT630 video card without a corrupt display after the machine boots into the installer. I ended up just (finally…) getting to the point in the text mode installer where I could opt NOT to use the Nouveau driver - which doesn’t work on this system at all. The other thing I saw was the installer refused to write the configuration to the drives - the “/” drive being a SSD and displaying some sort of error. Using the “mce=off” and no ACPI kernel allowed the system to load. once loaded and running Leap the kernel parameters have to be edited to the grub kernel options in the boot loader portion of Yast to make it permanent for booting the OS. Failing to do so will require using the OS installer media to boot the OS at all.
I realize that I could buy a replacement motherboard but I don’t really want to spend more money on a four year old PC when otherwise the system works wonderfully once everything is tweeked properly to the way I want it. Are there other motherboards out there like this with cruddy BIOS issues causing the MCE system to stall the OS this way? It doesn’t cause a kernel panic but it causes a whole bunch of stalls during boot-up and while running and making the system pretty much unusable.