[SOLVED] Live CD to Actual Install

[Nessa]

*duh* For some reason, I missed the "Press Tab" thing after F6 and I couldn't get where "quiet splash--" was.

I had some trouble booting the Live CD. From the happy and helpful people here, I've finally managed to make my first minty post. Had to press F6, delete "quiet splash--" and enter "all_generic_ide" to get into this. So, Live CD issues = kinks in hardware compatibility. What does that mean for my soon actual installation? If someone could share some insight into what I need to do so I can research and be ready beforehand, that'd be awesome.

My partitions are all ready. Ubuntu and my other OS's safe in other drives. Will wait a few minutes to see if anyone here can give me some tips before installing. Hopefully, I'll get a few ideas. If not, then I guess I'll just wing it.

~Nessa

[Nessa]

Ok, done.

I couldn't wait. I went ahead and installed Mint 5 on my usb drive using my older pc. Currently posting from an actual installation. Aside from some issues (error 17 and 18) with Grub, it was relatively painless. I'll include a description of my setup and try to be brief. This may be of some help to other users.

Hardware:
AMD Sempron 2200+
Asrock K7VM3 Motherboard
1 Gig of RAM
GeForce FX5200
80GB Hitachi IDE HDD - Windows XP
160GB Seagate IDE HDD - Ubuntu 8.04
80GB Western Digital Scorpio USB - Minty!

*These drives boot independently of each other. I don't need all of them to be connected to boot one up. I got this working by having separate boot loaders for each drive and use the BIOS boot menu to pick which one I want. I wanted it that way because I sometimes swap drives with my other pc.

USB Partitions:
[2048MB - swap]
[60GB extended (10GB Mint 5) (10GB empty) (10GB empty) (10GB empty) (10GB empty) (10GB /home)]
[12+GB NTFS]

The installation was smooth. My first boot was met with the famous Grub Error 17 and 18. The reason being how the BIOS and the Live CD arranged the drives. In the Live CD, the usb drive was third and my BIOS read it as the first drive. The solution was to edit the menu.lst and change all references to (hd2,4) to (hd0,4), which is where my Mint is.

After these small changes were saved, I booted up the USB drive and got the fancy stuff working. Oh, it's asking me for restricted drivers. Yes, please. Anyway, couldn't have done any of this without the resources here. Thank you for making a nice distro. I'm off to explore...

~Nessa

[Nessa]

This is so great! I got the same Mint 5 installation to run on my Sony Vaio VGN-FCR35G/L. Had to boot the Live CD first and change menu.lst references to /dev/sdc5 to /dev/sdb5. So when I switch computers, I can sudo into that and change it before I boot this usb drive onto the other one. Booted into recovery to fix X and autodetect the hardware since my desktop has Nvidia and this laptop uses ATI. I am happy to report that wifi works out of the box. It's prompting me to restart after downloading the restricted drivers. Will edit this once I'm back on.

Back! Everything looks fine and seem to work. The same Mint 5 installation works with 2 different machines. One's a really old AsRock/Nvidia/AMD-Sempron box and this Intel/ATI/Core2Duo-T8100. I did upgrade to the 18 kernel before trying this.

In summary:

1)menu.lst changes: desktop uses /dev/sdc5 and laptop uses /dev/sdb5
2)boot recovery mode to autodetect hardware and fix X
3)enjoy Mint on another device

I'm just happy it works as advertised and even more.