I have an P9X79-DELUXE motherboard, with 32GB of DDR3-1600 ECC RAM a SATA SSD with an SATA DVD burner because sometimes i do backups in optical media like an old man.
Using the latest version of Tumbleweed installer in a USB pendrive, boots normally and starts to run the YaST installer, but it gets stuck on “Starting udev…”, no matter what i do, like redownloading the image, changing USB drives, etc. UNLESS i unplug the DVD drive SATA cable from the motherboard, then YaST installer runs like nothing happened, it can handle other SATA drives like HDDs and SSDs but not DVD drives.
Not sure if is a Systemd issue because it also happens in recent versions of Fedora 43, in another X79-type motherboard i own, the X79-DELUXE with the same amount of RAM and SATA SSD drive, it hangs the live ISO indefinitvely (sometimes it restarts the system) unless i unplug the DVD drive (usually unplugging the SATA cable is enough)
Good you tested also Fedora 43 and can reproduce the problem there. That indeed makes it not something YaST specific but kernel or udev I would think.
Does the drive work fine once the system is booted?
You can the vendor/model via inxi -D, I would search for that keeping the results limited to say the last month and see what that gives. If you share the vendor/model here others can chime in.
Since already have another X79 system with OpenSUSE TW installed (and has no internal SATA DVD burner),so i decided to have this system with Fedora MATE+Compiz spin but somehow is really unstable,
It got installed, but the system freezes randomly after a while even with the DVD drive unplugged,
i have tried with other Linux distros (FoxClone, Artix, Devuan, hell, even Gentoo) and again OpenSUSE TW, worked like nothing happed, so i dunno i should bring this to the Fedora forums instead.
But yeah this kind of motherboard + DVD drive hangs the YasT installer unless unplugged, haven’t tried Leap/Agama yet, The Fedora one might be a new issue but i have no hope if the Fedora people may care for an old and power-hungry X79 computer.
In the BIOS is already set up as AHCI, but this particular X79 motherboards of ASUS has like 2 SATA chipsets: the one from Intel (SATA 2 and SATA 3) and Marvell.
both main SATA SSD and DVD drive is plugged in the same X79 SATA Intel chipset, (i think could be some weird old firmware jank from those motherboards, where Linux at the time ignored or worked it around, but newer versions broke it. )
UPDATE: In this particular system I’ve installed Debian Testing for now, but i get total system freeze under CPU and I/O heavy operation for an extended period of time.
Just stress-testing the CPU with stress-ng for a while didn’t freeze but compiling the O3DE Game Engine (a heavy C++ project btw) causes to freeze the system entirely.
So my main concern is the PSU is starting to turn bad or the X79 on-board SATA chipset is getting faulty.
UPDATE: Replaced the power supply for a slightly better one, an EVGA BR-500W bronze, even changed the graphics cards for an ref card. RX 480 just in case, now the SSD behaves erratic.
Doing a heavy random I/O operation, like compiling an large game engine, causes the SSD get “froze” and Linux desesperately tries reset the SATA connection with the controller, but every SATA command request it sends, dmesg reports the command reply is “frozen”, note i have to run dmesg in watch mode before the error happens because GNOME behaves erratic because it lost the connection with the SSD.
Probably it could be the SATA controller of the motherboard is starting to die, and i just tested the SSD in an USB enclosure, no problems at all, sure the SSD is an cheapo aliexpress i got a couple of years ago.