Mint LMDE 101303 Cinnamon boot issue

[darkan9el]

Hi all, I have a HP Pavilion ZE4900 Laptop that I have, I want to install Linux and I like Mint so for me its a natural choice to choose a Mint distro. The laptop CPU does not support PAE and this is the reason for using the Mint LMDE 101303 Cinnamon release (32bit) The laptop will only have linux, there is not enough space to have a dual boot or anything like that plus I want to keep it as simple as possible.

I can boot to the live DVD, I can install Mint, but it will not boot. The HDD is approx 40GB and to keep it simple I just formatted the whole HDD as ext4 and installed mint... or so I thought. When I reboot and remove the disk it's telling me there is no system found, This grub issue doesn't appear to be working for me.

During the install process, it asks to install grub and its default selection is to /dev/sda the little box next to the install grub text has a x in it, clicking on that box places a tick in it. I have tried both methods and none appear to work!

What am I doing wrong?

TIA

[Monsta]

The laptop CPU does not support PAE and this is the reason for using the Mint LMDE 101303 Cinnamon release (32bit)

Try Mint 13, it doesn't require PAE. If the result is the same then your HDD is probably faulty. (No wonder, considering this laptop model is about 10 years old.)

Moreover, a little googling showed me this laptop has a weak video card - Intel 82855 GME. If that's true, Cinnamon either won't run at all or will run quite slow. Consider using MATE or Xfce.

[darkan9el]

Thanks for replying Monsta, I know I'm being a bit optimistic with this practically neolithic laptop lol will try Mint 13 mate and report back

[darkan9el]

Much easier installation, all installed and running well. Considering the laptops age and memory it runs surprisingly well. I like the clean look of MATE. thank you for your advice.