Linux Mint Forums

Hi all,

after several years on Ubuntu, I decided to give Mint a try so I downloaded the 64-bit version of KDE Mint (edition 14 /Nadia). The MD5 hash is identical, so I'm good on that front.

At first I dumped the contents of the iso file into a USB pen drive and tried to boot my laptop using it. I got a black screen with just a "Boot error" message.
Then I read I should use the unetbootin, so I did. Same result: Boot error on a black screen.
I tried different pen drives but the result was always the same.
What the heck, I dumped the USB pen drive approach and burned the iso contents onto a DVD. Tried to boot with that and at least that gave me some progress. This time I got a different message: "Error 8000 reading sector 534467 - No DEFAULT or UI configuration directive found". After some reading, I renamed isolinux to syslinux at three spots at the USB pen drive and gave it another go: "Boot error".
I reformatted the pen drive, tried again: "Boot error".

It's worth noting that the DVD boots normally on a Sony Vaio laptop I happened to have handy here.
My laptop is a Toshiba Portege M800 with 4GB RAM.

I'm one step before dumping the entire Mint idea but I'm eager to find out what on earth goes wrong and why.
Any assistance would be really really appreciated, thanks guys.

If you're on Ubuntu, I've had good luck with the startup disk creator. It's in the repositories as "usb-creator-gtk" (use the KDE one if you're on KDE of course). If you're trying this from windows, I like the LinuxLive USB creator. I've had bad luck with unetbootin for a few years.

You might also want to try a different pen drive. I have 2 PNY drives that absolutely will not boot anything. I have a handful of no-name ones I've acquired at conventions that all work flawlessly. I have a mini PNY that will only boot Windows ISOs. I still haven't figured that one out.

My Ubuntu installation is in non-operational state after the last upgrade, so I opted for the LinuxLive USB Creator.
It took considerably longer time than unetbootin to prepare the drive, but it did a good job: my laptop now runs a live Mint environment. I'm off to install it, thank you very much bigj231!

Glad I could help. Could you edit the title of your original post to include [SOLVED]