Have you tried to disable serial and parallell ports in bios?? Mine hang when these ports was enabled.
Parallel port was already disabled, I disabled the serial port, with the same end result.
You should verify your AHCI configuration in the BIOS.
Can you boot on maintenance mode with GRUB?
This motherboard does not have AHCI as an option. IDE or RAID.
I got it to work now though. The issue was that the PC that I was installing it onto did not have a CD/DVD drive, so I was installing it from USB. It seems like the grub loader was being installed onto the installation USB stick. I burned the installation onto DVD, and connected a USB dvd drive and was able to install and update everything now!
Thanks for your thoughts on the issue.