Only 15% Install solved

[LinuxForever]

I have a problem installing LinuxMint. At first it saw my third drive as sda and my first drive as sdb and my second drive as sde. I've had this problem with a few other distros so I unplugged my second and third drives and tried installing again. Mint saw my first drive as sda but during the install it could only go as far as 15% of the total install.

I'm using the live CD of Linux Mint 5 Elyssa BETA 032
. What am I doing wrong? Should I try installing Mint 4?

Also I need to know if Mint has RealPlayer 11 and mpeg4 codecs in it's repos od would I have to install those at the command line. Thankx for any help.

[Husse]

I don't think you are doing something wrong
I guess you are using SATA The SATA connectors on the mobo has a priority order (or whatever to call it) It is however possible to boot from any drive - that's a setting in BIOS This means you could have what logically is the first disk on a SATA connector that is not the first and that can cause the confusion you have
mpeg4 no problem, you can play Real audio files but that's not my favorite - don't know version

[LinuxForever]

Thank you Husse. I don't think I have SATA. My motherboard only has PATA, IDE, ATA/100. So my drives are ATA/100. I tried an ATA/133 Maxtor once and my motherboard BIOS couldn't work with it.

Ubuntu, Fedora and Sabayon also see my drives as SATA and so see my first drive (boot drive) as sda. Mandriva 2008.0 and Debian see my drives as PATA, IDE and so see my first drive as hda. It just seems to depend on which installer is used.

So, Ubuntu is based on Debian, Fedora on RedHat, Saybon on Gentoo, Mandriva on RedHat, Mint on Ubuntu and Debian is just Debian. But, only Mandriva installs like Debian. My head hurts. I wonder why some see them as SATA and others see them as PATA, IDE?

[Husse]

Aha - so you have three hard disks and one optical unit
Two hard disks on the same IDE cable can be a recipe for disaster
I would suggest you move the disks so that the same disks no longer share the IDE cable - they may not like each other
Also the disk that is slave (don forget to change that) should be first on the cable and the connector that is at the end of the longest gap between connectors should (almost must) be connected to the motherboard.
The lone disk should (almost must) be master and the optical unit slave
It could work whatever you do (except putting two masters or two slaves on the same cable) but you get this type of "funny" errors if you don't do it right.
This can be enough to stop you.
I can tell you I had "hell" installing Elyssa and ended up reporting a bug in Ubiquty. I don't think you are at risk, but if you have lots of partitions there are problems, but they don't appear at 15%

[LinuxForever]

I'll tell you how I have my drives set up. I really appreciate all this help.

Okay, I have one IDE ATA/100 connection on my motherboard with an 18 inch cable with 2 connectors on it. On the last connector I have my boot drive set as master running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS right now. The second connector has my second drive set as slave. On this second drive is a 2 gig swap partition and a 36 gig partition formatted with etc3.

Then I have an ATA/100 IDE, pci card with my third drive. This drive has a 2 gig swap partition and a 110 gig partition formated with etc3. It's connected to an 18 inch ATA/100 cable on the last connector of the cable. It's set to master.

Then on the connector on the motherboard for the CD burner I have a cable for 2 CD burners with just one CD burner connected to the last connector on the cable. That burner is set to master.

I think this is all about installers and I've found not all distros use the same installer. It's a difference I can live with though as long as I can get the OS's installed.

I'm downloading Mint 4 Main Edition with Gnome as I type this and I'll burn a CD and try it and post my results tomorrow. All the reviews I've read about Mint say it's on it's way to being number one and one review said it's what Ubuntu should have been. So I'm really keen to try it. Thankx again for your help.

[LinuxForever]

I burned a CD with Mint 4 Main Edition with Gnome and then I thought why don't I give Mint 5 beta 032 another try and it saw the drives right and installed. I used the portal to install Miro and the sound on mpeg4 vid's is perfect. I searched in the portal for realplayer and in the packager manager but it's not in them. How do I download and install realplayer? I need it to plug into firefox to work with BBC 7 radio.

[LinuxForever]

Never mind about realplayer. I just tried BBC 7 and the BBC player works. How does Mint do that? I've never had a distro with the BBC player working out of the box! In all the other distros I had to install realplayer first! Three cheers for Linux Mint! I found the perfect distro!

[Husse]

Good!
And I think the varying results for partitions is caused by this

Then I have an ATA/100 IDE, pci card with my third drive.

As this is on a pci card it is seen differently by different apps
The drive should be connected to the mobo and the CD/DVD drives to the pci card
But don't change now that it works