The installer wants to wipe partitions at all cost ?!?

[sabin]

Hello everyone,

Because of hardware issues with my system disk, I'm trying to install mint on a data storage hard disk as the only plugged HDD of my PC tower. That data storage disk has already existing partitions. I had prepared in advance, through partitions resizing,created enough free space for a Linux installation... Or so I believed

You can refer to the screenshots below, the Mint installer gives me only one choice, to erase everything on the disk
That would leave me with the option to use the advanced editor, but I'm totally new with this.

This is extremely surprising, when my system disk with a dying win7 (hardware issues) was still plugged, the installer would understand the problem and offer to install Mint in the available free partition of the data storage disk.
Here, the system disk is unplugged (just having it plugged was causing PC freezes, grrr), and now Mint won't offer NOT to erase all data on the disk

Please, isn't there any way to make the installer finally understand how to do its job ?!? Or else, please tell me where I'm mistaken

Here are the screenshots, to make yourself an idea :

(the first one is a full-screen capture, I opened gparted alongside it to give you a clear idear, click the thumbnail to enlarge it)



And the second one is what I see when I click to see the other options apart from straight erasing :



This situation seems quite strange to me, so I wonder if I wouldn't have missed something
Thanks if you can tell me what you think of it !

[viking777]

The answer is right in front of you in your second screenshot. Click at the intersection of the line/column 'free space' and 'mount point' select (or type) the symbol / (meaning root) tick the format box, tick install - job done (assuming you only want one partition for the install).

Edit. Don't know why you don't get the 'Install alongside' option though, strange that, you should.

[sabin]

Thanks Viking

Did that... and discovered that, apparently, my hardware problem didn't lie with my system disk, I had yet another PC freeze during the installation on that partition. All that's left is my motherboard. Noooooooooo.

No mint, no working computer, that's called a double penalty.

Oh well, at least, for future circumstances, I'll know what do to !

Thanks again

[HughT]

Hi sabin, you've not been able to use the free 340.65 GiB (367.912 GB) space because it's not a partition and it has no file system. Use Gparted to format that space as ext4. Don't be afraid of using the advanced install option - use it choose the new partition, presumably it'll be sda8.
regards

[viking777]

I don't quite follow what the problem is, but it sounds a bit serious

Hope you sort it out somehow.

Rgds. viking