Mint 13 Cinnamon installed now won't boot

[PaganPen]

Dear all,

I realise there are overlapping posts, but having spent several days trying to figure this one, I thought I should post in the end!

I have an older Fujitsue Siemens Scaleo P desktop that previously ran win xp until it became so buggy that it would no longer even boot. My son needs a machine for his homework so I thought I could breathe life back into the old machine with a linux install. I read the reviews and finally chose MINT as the one I'd like to install. I downloaded and burnt copies of MINT 14 MATE and MINT 13 CINNAMON. Installation was not at all straightforward. Sometimes a lice CD would work and sometimes it would just hang. I scoured the forums and tried various combinations of nomodeset, nolapic, loapic, nvidia.modeset=o and eventually I managed to install MINT 14, but then with a shutdown and reboot it would not boot. So after some more tussles I managed to install MINT 13. This took some doing as at first it would fail on Xorg - so no graphical interface. Through scouring forums I eventually tried code to purge the standard video drivers and make MINT use the proprietry nvidia drivers - voila - it worked. I had MINT 13 running - it looked great, and even started on reboot. Then I downloaded and installed a few software packages, including WINE. Whilst using WINE, the system froze and no key combination would revive it - so had to hold down the power until it went off and reboot. Only it wouldn't.

Current situation - I can't reboot into MINT 13 not even in recovery. I can't boot a live CD of either MINT editions.

I know from previous experimentation that FEDORA 17 seems to install without problem, but I just didn't like it as much, so how to remedy MINT?

The machine has a Intel® Pentium® 4 HT, an Nvidia Geforce 6200 video card in PCI express. It has onboard sound but also a SOUND BLASTER AUDIGY 2 card plugged in. It has two HDs, an optical drive, but does not boot from USB. Its an ASUS motherboard with American Megatrends BIOS dating to about 2005 - can't find any newer.

I'm guessing this is still something to do with the NVIDIA card? But if I try and boot in recovery mode, the last line I see is [ 6.258196] Audigy2 value: Special config. After that is just the blinking cursor, it hangs and seemingly the keyboard is also lifeless as you can't apply num lock

Any and all suggestions greatly appreciated!

[741cc]

How much ram do you have on that box? I'm guessing its fairly old hardware. Mint 13 Release Notes http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2031 recommend 1GB ram, with a minimum of 512MB.
The XFCE and LXDE desktops will run better on lower spec machines and they are quite similar to Cinnamon/Mate. Maybe worth a try.

[PaganPen]

Hi there - it has 3gb of ram - the max for that 32bit machine - so that shouldn't be a problem. I ran the memory test and it seemed to pass everything -
but could give that a go -

thanks,

PP