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Re: Mint 6 install fails at partition stage

Posted: Tue Apr 14, 2009 2:34 pm
by viking777
I personally don't have problems with sata drives, but that doesn't mean to say that you won't.

I can suggest two things that you may or may not wish to try. These are suggestions not necessarily solutions - please note.

Firstly use your windows install to download and burn a gparted live cd from http://sourceforge.net/project/showfile ... _id=271779 (or you could put it on USB if you want). Boot from this and use it to create the partitions you want then try to install using the partitions you have already created.

Secondly, if you don't want to do that then remember this. Linux will run quite happily without any swap partition at all if your machine has a reasonable amount of memory (almost any modern machine these days does). So if it is the creation of a swap partition that makes your installation fail then don't create one, leave some unallocated space so you can create one later if you want (once you have it installed).

One last piece of advice. It is very, very unlikely that you need 5Gb of swap space. 2Gb is about the most you will ever need.

Re: Mint 6 install fails at partition stage

Posted: Tue Apr 14, 2009 5:36 pm
by Aging Technogeek
If you have 3 Gb of ram, you will probably never use your swap space but put in a nominal swap (about 256 Mb is adequate) because Linux can act unpredictably if there is no swap.

Having said that, I will now contradict myself to a degree. If you have a laptop and you want to use the hibernate function, your swap space should be equal to or greater than your installed ram. When you enter hibernate everything in ram is saved to swap.

The error message you are getting may be because the partitioner ran out of disk space before it had completed the swap install. Always leave a few gigabytes free at the end of the disk - not all 500 Gb disks are truly 500 Gb. They may be 495 Gb or something else. Also, the MBR , disk table of contents, and other disk utilities can take up to 5GB on a 500 GB disk that may not be shown in the partition table.

Parting advice: read this - http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=90&t=11872.

Re: Mint 6 install fails at partition stage

Posted: Wed Apr 15, 2009 12:27 pm
by viking777
Sorry to hear that didn't work. If this fails repeatedly then possible causes are a faulty installation disk or a faulty hard drive. It is probably easier to test the former. You will have to download again, test the md5 sum against the published one then burn the disk again at a slow speed. This fixes many problems of this nature. If it is a hard disk failure (I was trying to help somebody recently who had a hard drive failure after only three months use!) then you would probably need to investgate 'smartmontools' although I have never used it and it seems fearfully complicated. As you have a Windows install, you may be able to get hold of a testing program from the disk manufacturer and run it on Windows (they rarely (never?) make them to run on Linux).

Re: Mint 6 install fails at partition stage (SOLVED)

Posted: Sat Apr 25, 2009 12:07 am
by mipcar
I see you've solved your problem so this is just an aside now.
When I ran Gparted live Cd I found it worked better with more reliable partitioning if when I loaded the cd amd I clicked on the option of "loading into memory", then ejecting the CD.

No idea why it makes a difference but it did for me.

Mychael