New install won't boot

[wcnackers]

Has anyone seen this before.

I boot Linux Mint 14 (Nadia?) from a thumb drive. The thumb drive was created with a 32bit .iso I downloaded and installed to the thumb drive with unetbootin. After booting to the the desktop, I click on the install icon. Installation to a hard drive finishes without any errors but when I reboot and try to boot to the hard drive I get the following error message:

error: premature end of file /boot/vmlinuz-3.5.0-17-generic
error: you need to load the kernel first

Does anyone have any idea what this is and how to get around it. Need to get a netbook setup ASAP with some flavor of a Linux distro and Mint seemed like the logical choice but I'll have to try something else if I can't get around this.

thanks!

wcn

[karlchen]

Hello, wcn.

Please, give us as many details about the hardware specificiations as possible. In particular, any details related to the hard disk drive and the hard disk controller will be of interest. E.g. it would be more than helpful to know whether the machine uses the old-school MBR or whether it uses UEFI boot.

You might use the live system in order to get some basic details on the hardware:

• In a terminal window execute

  Code: Select all

  inxi -Fx

  and post the output.
• You might launch GParted from the Menu and post a screenshot which illustrates the hard disk layout. - Make sure to resize the GParted window in such a way that relevant information is not chopped off.
• You might launch "System Information" from the menu, generate a report and post the report here.

Kind regards,
Karl

[wcnackers]

Hi Karl,

Thanks for getting back to me. As it turns out, somehow or another my unetbootin install of the .iso to the USB drive must have been corrupted. I re-burnt the .iso, this time to a CD and everything worked fine. I'm not sure what I could have done but something must have been messed up.

Anyway MInt is up and running. The only issue I have yet to resolve is the wireless NIC (which I have read is a problem in LInux). I might just go buy a cheap USB one and see if I have better results.

Again, thanks1

wcn

[karlchen]

Hello, wcn.

Great that you succeeded in the end.

The only issue I have yet to resolve is the wireless NIC (which I have read is a problem in LInux)

Hm. Yes and no. It clearly depends on which wifi adapter we are talking about.
Again the output of

Code: Select all

inxi -Fx

might help find out which adapter is detected and which drivers are in use.
Also beware:
When using Network Manager in order to administer network devices in a comfortable way, be aware that Network Manager will
+ not acivate the WLAN connection to your DSL router in case a wired connection has been established before
+ not acivate the wired connection to your DSL router in case a wireless connection has been established before
So it is some kind of either-or situation.
Only a few days ago, there was a thread here, where a wifi adapter seemed to be inactive no matter how hard the user tried to activate it. In the end it turnt out that pulling the network cable was enough to make Network Manager enable the WLAN connection and use it successfully.

Kind regards,
Karl