Installation Problem

[myballsglow]

So, I'm totally new to Linux but I was so excited to try my first install. A few days ago my wife's Lenovo 3000 N100 laptop had hard drive failure and of course I
never had gotten around to making a boot disk with the Lenovo utilities and since the hdd is cooked the recovery partition does little to help... But I digress.

So this was now my big chance to test out linux since I really don't want to buy a new Windows OS to install on her computer. I downloaded Mint Live DVD last night, checked
the m5sum as the user guide instructed, dvd seems just fine. I checked the BIOS on her computer, boot sequence was already set to boot from DVD drive, so I placed the
disc in the computer and started the boot process. Everything seems to work just fine, I can get to the menu screen, but then when I try to "start mint" or "check disc integrity" I get to a black screen that says "Loading /casper/initrd.lz.............." On the second row of dots the cursor gets about two-thirds across the screen then just sits and blinks, nothing happens after this, just sits there....forever, I let it sit for a very long time last night and nothing happens. So far not so good....please help me I really need to get her
computer up and going today. Your help will be greatly appreciated.

[oobetimer]

So, I'm totally new to Linux but I was so excited to try my first install. A few days ago my wife's Lenovo 3000 N100 laptop had hard drive failure and of course I
never had gotten around to making a boot disk with the Lenovo utilities and since the hdd is cooked the recovery partition does little to help... But I digress.

So this was now my big chance to test out linux since I really don't want to buy a new Windows OS to install on her computer. I downloaded Mint Live DVD last night, checked
the m5sum as the user guide instructed, dvd seems just fine. I checked the BIOS on her computer, boot sequence was already set to boot from DVD drive, so I placed the
disc in the computer and started the boot process. Everything seems to work just fine, I can get to the menu screen, but then when I try to "start mint" or "check disc integrity" I get to a black screen that says "Loading /casper/initrd.lz.............." On the second row of dots the cursor gets about two-thirds across the screen then just sits and blinks, nothing happens after this, just sits there....forever, I let it sit for a very long time last night and nothing happens. So far not so good....please help me I really need to get her
computer up and going today. Your help will be greatly appreciated.

Probably some other distro works better on her computer. Mint 9 is quite unstable so far, so I recommend Mandriva instead ..

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=mandriva

http://mandriva-fi.org/foorumi/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=1920

http://translate.google.fi/translate?hl ... 26t%3D1920

[myballsglow]

Okay I can look at that...i was hoping that someone might have a solution to the problem so that I can use mint as I thought that Mint was supposedly
the most user-friendly linux distro for newbies...maybe I was wrong.