▲ 6 r/BC250Gaming
OS installation impossible on functional BC-250 ?
Hi all,
I'm running into a hard wall trying to install Bazzite on a BC-250 card. I have gone through multiple guides but cannot get past the boot phase. I am keen on figuring stuff alone or exploring but now I am meeting a dead end, and a lot of frustration over this fun project. I hope the following information can help locate the issue:
1. Hardware settings and changes :
- Replaced thermal paste and pads
- Added custom 3D-printed airflow setup with Arctic P12 fans
- Using a 550W Cooler Master ATX PSU with external switch
- Installed 500GB SSD - 970 EVO Samsung NVMe
2. BIOS configuration
- BIOS updated to P3
- Graphics:
- GFX → Force Integrated Graphics
- UMA Mode → UMA_SPECIFIED
- UMA Frame Buffer → 512M
- CPU:
- IOMMU → Disabled
3. Installation media tried
bazzite-deck-stable-live-amd64.isobazzite-deck-gnome-stable-live-amd64.isoedit: Recently tried with Fedora and CatchyOS, no luck either.
USB creation tools tested:
- Rufus
- balenaEtcher
- Ventoy
Also tested:
- Multiple USB sticks for installation
- Different monitors
4. Current behavior of the card (where I am stuck)
- Power on system → fans spin, system starts normally
- Boot menu (Ventoy or direct USB) loads fine
- GRUB menu appears → can select:
- Normal mode
- Simplified graphics mode
- I even tried nomodeset but no good results. I also tried a bunch of GRUB settings, namely :
- nomodeset
- amdgpu.dc=0 (mostly because it seems to be GPU based ? Black/white screen and kernel panic)
- video = 800x600 (I am using a 4k monitor)
- maxcpus=2 (I saw some thread that managed with reducing the CPU amount)
- removing quiet rghb to see text
- using multi.user to be able to log and launch the installation based on text/simplified mode
- After selection: (added some pictures of what I usually can see)
- Either freezes, or hangs indefinitely on Bazzite logo
- More recently, and trying through either bazzite legacy installer or Fedora 44 iso, I managed to get to the desktop phase of installation, but it crashes around 20% (after selecting language, ssd, etc)
- Also recently tried to install the version steam-deck-bazzite on my laptop to then directly read it on the BC-250, no luck either.
- I ran a Memtest86, and It was full of errors. I noticed some of my thermal pads attached themself on the headplate rather that on the RAM chip. Fixing it did not help.
Never reaches full installation.
This is my second post on reddit, so please feel free to suggest better format to either post in the right place or frame the query 😄
u/Top-Drive8004 — 4 days ago
