Can't install Mint on my Vaio VPC-Z11 (but Ubuntu installs)

[Esulin]

I'm a long time Windows user trying to make a switch to Linux. A couple years ago I switched from ASP.NET development etc. to PHP on Ubuntu server. I've been playing around with a lot of distros in VMWare, but now I'd like to try and give it a go full -time on my laptop (dual-boot just in case).

In a nutshell my problem revolves around the fake-raid setup based on the 2x64GB SSDs.

I was trying to install Mint XFCE without any joy. Basically the installer would detect the SSD Raid just fine and mount it on /dev/mapper/.... I could then partition the 128GB RAID drive as I liked and the install would go through fine. But after a reboot I'd get a grub error message about it not finding the /dev/mapper/... partition. I tried installing with the bootloader on a 128MB primary partition at the beginning of the disk and on the same partition as the /. Both failed.

On a whim I then tried a Xubuntu distro (specifically Voyager) and even though the installer looked virtually identical, the install worked just fine. I then installed Win8 and used EasyBCD to modify the bootloader to add the Xubuntu Grub partition and that worked too.

I still have the Xubuntu installed so I'm thinking that I could check the current configuration and based on that 'fix' the Mint install. I just don't quite know where to look and what for.

Please help!

[Esulin]

Well, surprise surprise... I tried installing Mint Cinnamon 14 (instead of Mint XFCE) on top of the partition that I had Xubuntu installed and it worked. Interestingly enough, my Windows boot-loader is still there and the old entry for Xubuntu loads Cinnamon just fine.

I did however spot the following in the installer syslog:

Code: Select all

Feb 16 16:24:31 mint ubiquity:   Volume group "isw_ebdiaihade_Volume0p1" not found
Feb 16 16:24:31 mint ubiquity:   Skipping volume group isw_ebdiaihade_Volume0p1
Feb 16 16:24:31 mint grub-installer: info: Identified partition label for /dev/mapper/isw_ebdiaihade_Volume0p1: loop
Feb 16 16:24:33 mint grub-installer: dpkg: warning: ignoring request to remove grub which isn't installed
Feb 16 16:24:33 mint grub-installer: dpkg: warning: ignoring request to remove grub-legacy which isn't installed
Feb 16 16:24:33 mint grub-installer: dpkg: warning: ignoring request to remove grub-efi which isn't installed
Feb 16 16:24:33 mint grub-installer: dpkg: warning: ignoring request to remove grub-efi-amd64-bin which isn't installed
Feb 16 16:24:33 mint grub-installer: dpkg: warning: ignoring request to remove grub-efi-amd64 which isn't installed
Feb 16 16:24:33 mint grub-installer: dpkg: warning: ignoring request to remove grub-efi-ia32-bin which isn't installed
Feb 16 16:24:33 mint grub-installer: dpkg: warning: ignoring request to remove grub-efi-ia32 which isn't installed
Feb 16 16:24:33 mint ubiquity: Error: Can't have a partition outside the disk!
Feb 16 16:24:34 mint ubiquity: grub-probe: error: unknown filesystem.
Feb 16 16:24:34 mint grub-installer: info: Installing grub on '/dev/mapper/isw_ebdiaihade_Volume0p1'
Feb 16 16:24:34 mint grub-installer: info: grub-install does not support --no-floppy
Feb 16 16:24:34 mint grub-installer: info: Running chroot /target grub-install  --force "/dev/mapper/isw_ebdiaihade_Volume0p1"
Feb 16 16:24:35 mint grub-installer: /usr/sbin/grub-bios-setup: warning: File system `ext2' doesn't support embedding.
Feb 16 16:24:35 mint grub-installer: /usr/sbin/grub-bios-setup: warning: Embedding is not possible.  GRUB can only be installed in this setup by using blocklists.  However, blocklists are UNRELIAB$
Feb 16 16:24:35 mint grub-installer: Installation finished. No error reported.
Feb 16 16:24:35 mint grub-installer:
Feb 16 16:24:35 mint grub-installer: info: grub-install ran successfully


I guess for now it works, but I have a feeling I'm going to face this issue again if I ever want to install on a clean formatted disk.

Thanks for reading.