(SOLVED) Failing to install debian stretch (9) on an asus p9x79 motherboard

At first, i checked the MD5 of the DVD which was as follows
b894f1e8ebf3065a488b6c01a742cf4e = debian-9.0.0-amd64-DVD-1.iso

The lowdown: Bottom line before you waste your time, the trick is disabling secure boot in the bios, if that does not work, read the article, it is faster if you see my trial and error than doing it yourself.

Following that, i DD the DVD onto a flash stick, Trying to install with network mirror, during the “Select and install software” stage, i get the following error on a beautiful red screen

Installation step failed
An installation step failed. You can try to run the failing item again from the menu, or skip it and choose something else. The failing step is: Select and install software

And a continue button that takes me to the list of steps/stages

In any case, the next time, i tried without a network mirror, and that stage completed successfully, but what do you know, a new error popped up, this time concerning the inability to install grub on the partition.

trying the above with a USB DVD gave the same exact errors, and thinking it might be a USB issue, i installed an internal SATA hard drive, but still same error.

So the only way to continue at this stage (Where both grub and LILO would not install is to continue without installing a boot loader.

So, considering the circumstance, i had 2 options, fix it manually, or try to figure the problem out, figuring out the problem would seem wiser, since We don’t want to have this problem every time we come across an installation scenario

Note: Disabling hardware turned out to be irrelevant, its all about the secure boot.
So i entered into UEFI (Delete at post), and disabled everything that may be causing the problem, for example, i disabled the azilla audio, I disabled the USB 3 Controller (Asmedia), and so forth, then i noticed that there is a secure boot option that had 2 options within, the first would be Windows and the other would be non windows.

So i switched that to non-windows (Even though the windows option worked fine on Jessie, and then went back to the USB flash stick, booted the system.

So this time, the installer is telling me that (SCREENSHOT)

So the answer to whether or not i should force the UEFI installer or not was YES, force it

As for whether or not to use a network mirror, for the sake of this article, i decided to experiment with installing with network mirror yet, then if that does not work, run the installer without a network mirror, the reason is that the secure boot option, if it were to fix anything, is most likely going to fix the failing to write boot manager, so to have this complete, we will need to start with the one more likely to fail

So running the installer with network mirror came back with the same error as anticipated, So i ran the installer again, but with no network mirror, and now the error is “Unable to install GRUB in dummy, executing “grub-install dummy failed”

So, now that all those options have failed, I am up for one last thing to try, I will boot from a linux stick, then issue the following command

wipefs -a /dev/sda

Now let us try again !

Now, a new error, the installer claims that a 40GB SSD is too small to be partitioned (Maybe because 64GB of ram will make a swap file larger than the disk) , so i rebooted again to the debian USB stick, but this time, to delete any existing partitions on the disk (Even though wipefs should have handled that)

So, because parted was not available, i used fdisk, followed by “o” followed by create a new partition on the whole disk

Next step, i took the 40GB SSD, reduced the ram on an HP 8300 USFF PC to 4GB, installed the disk and installed debian stretch (Using network mirror !), all went perfectly, now we would like to examine if it would boot the other computer, it did not,

Solution:
so i installed the OS on a very old core2 duo laptop, then it worked on the asusp9x79 after i enabled legacy mode rather than UEFI in the bios, I also made sure the boot disk was on the first sata port (SDA), and thats that.

I anticipate that this problem will also apply if you try to upgrade Jessie to Stretch, so BEFORE YOU UPGRADE, switch that UEFI secure boot option to non windows (Or disabled) depending on your motherboard.