GA-965P-S3 - failures at partitioning stage every time

[einy]

Hello,

 

I am hopelessly stuck, please suggest what should I do.

 

My hardware:

Gigabyte GA-965P-S3 BIOS revision F13

one empty SATA hard drive (connected to SATA0 yellow socket)

one SATA DVD-ROM drive for installation (connected to GSATA0 purple socket)

 

BIOS settings:

SATA AHCI Mode: AHCI

Onboard SATA/IDE Ctrl Mode: IDE

 

Socket and BIOS parameters above were the only choice that let the installation reach GUI phase.

 

When I run Disk Utility to either convert active FAT32 partition to HFS+ (as numerous guides suggest) or create HFS+ partition on an unpartitioned HDD via "Erase" command, I am getting one of the following things:

 

1. Stuck at "dismounting disk" stage - mouse pointer runs, but no progress for minutes

2. If dismounting disk completes in 3-4 minuntes, then stuck at "mounting disk" stage

3. If everything is OK so far, stuck at "examining available disks" stage

4. If everything is OK, no newly converted partition is shown at partition selection screen (a screen from where I called Disk Utility)

5. When sometimes creating disk-wide partition on an empty HDD ends well, this partition becomes unmountable and shows "Invalid BS_jmpBoot in boot block 000000" error when checked

 

After any of the above, when I do hard reset, the HDD appears corrupted and unaccessible until I turn off the PC.

 

NB! The very first time I succeeded to break through all the stages - I've selected necessary patches etc. but finally an error smth. like "Installer was unable to create folder /Volumes/Leopard/BaseSystem.pkg.160NlrgYA" popped up.

 

Afterr reboot, I was unable to reach that far anymore (see points 1...5 above)

 

I tried both Kalyway 10.5.2 and iDeneb 10.5.7.

I tried both Seagate 500Gb and Samsung 750Gb SATA HDDs

 

 

Please suggest anything that could help!

 

Best regards,

Dmitry.