WIN7, Linux Mint

[subcook]

Hello All!

I am new to these forums.

I am also new to linux, I have been playing with opensuse 11.2 - gnome for about 2 months now and love it. I am now going to play with distros, and the next on the list would be ubuntu. After some research, I ended up here, because mint seems to be for noobs, like myself. My question is this. I would like to dual boot Win7, and mint. Win7 is already installed, unfortunatly I have picked up very quickly that Windows is very anti-social. I'm hoping for a little bit of guidance, on how to work around that. I have already backed up my win7. any advice on how to setup the paritions?

Also, I have downloaded mint onto a USB. unfortunately, I am currently in college, and have a very evil X-wife, therefore I am broke and cannot afford blank CD/dvd's. Is it possible to install mint8 via flash drive without jacking up winblows7?

Any other advice is very much appreciated, and please remember I am new.......



-cheers

[mmesantos1]

Hi there and welcome to Linux MInt.

Here is a great prgram that runs in windows for creating USB bootable flash drive. You can download Linux Mint 8 ISO and use this prgram in windows to creat live CD wich you can install Mint 8 from. You can use the installer to auto partition your hard drive. The installer will allow you to choose to resize the windows partition and during this process you can pick how large you want you Linux and windows partitions to be.

Link for Pendrive Linux installer: http://www.pendriveapps.com/

Link for Linux Mint user guide for Mint 8: http://ftp.heanet.ie/pub/linuxmint.com/ ... sh_8.1.pdf

[subcook]

yeah and thats my issue..... I will not have accessto blank CD's for about 3 weeks.....




......lost casue until than???



-cheers

[GhoS]

You misunderstood. What mmesantos meant if you use the program mentioned it can create it so you can install using the USB drive. It will behave exactly like a disc when inserted, just have to make sure to boot off the USB drive.

You'll enjoy Mint a lot, very easy to use. Personally I prefer the KDE version ( it can be more Windows-Like in places than Gnome), but either way one of the best distros (not just for newbies)

[subcook]

Yes, I definitely misunderstood. ?That link definitely helps the cause. I am, however, running into the issue of actually setting up to boot off of the USB. Can I still run these in harmony?!

also keep in mind I'm using an older box

HP 422n pavilion
Intel 845 PCI just to give you an idea ....

how does one go about enabling the capability of boot from USB ?? ? ..... and yes, at this point my goal is to run it as live cd ...


-cheers

[vincent]

Being able to boot from USB has no relationship to how old your box is. All you have to do is to reboot, and on the BIOS screen, which normally appears first thing at boot and displays the logo of your manufacturer, press a certain button to dwelve into your BIOS setup/settings; for me it's F2. There should be an option somewhere to set boot order; have your computer boot from USB before it boots from HDD, save your BIOS settings, reboot, and then you should be able to boot from USB.

[DataMan]

There should be an option somewhere to set boot order; have your computer boot from USB before it boots from HDD, save your BIOS settings, reboot, and then you should be able to boot from USB.

Definitely check out the options in the bios as previously recommended. Some M/B's don't accommodate booting from a usb (case in point, I've go an old intel m/b (DG95 series) on my retired PC where this is not an option and the firmware update don't help either). If you've got it go for the usb option.

-DataMan

[subcook]

Yes, I should have been more clear... I had already double checked the BIOS menu, no option... any other ideas though?

-cheers

[mick55]

USB boot without BIOS support

http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html

[deleted]

You can also check for BIOS updates for your computer. Most BIOSs allow you to boot USB now.
-Hinto

[Phaedrus]

Also worth pointing out sometimes usb flash drives show up in the BIOS as hard drives so have a look there.

[kat22]

I have installed mint KDE CE on a number of comps in my neighbourhood using a 4GB pen drive...
any external USB memory device should serve the purpose...
i use a USB starter disk creator (included in Ubuntu repository) to creat a boot disk from the downloaded image

[subcook]

Mick55 referred me to the PloP bootloader...


So,

If I wanted to add plpinstc.com ( PloP bootloader installer) to ( what I normally would do - menu.lst, I would change the " load kernel line from kernel /boot/vmlinuz.etc to kernel boot/plpinstc.com). I did change the permissions to the grub.cfg file, but its not letting me save it. Is there a specific grub config file that someone can refer me to for this???


thanks in advance



-cheers

[mick55]

Uuummmm.........

You seem to have misunderstood the point of PLOP.

It is to enable you to boot a USB device on a PC that does not support booting from USB.

You write the PLOP disk image to a floppy disk, and boot from that.

You do not make any changed to menu.lst or anything else related to your Linux install.

I recommend you read the PLOP page again and follow the directions on that page.

I do not know how you arrived at the conclusion you did.

[subcook]

okay,

I did do all of the above, and it worked sucessfully.

In order to install PloP you have to put the file plpinstc.com in your menu list under the boot kernel part ( kernel /boot/plpinstc.com). And this did work, but after I did the clean install, I still had my original desktop, with whatever files I had left on it. It also did whatever to grub to give me the original problem back, and PloP disapeared. Being the new linux user that I am, and I have been dealing with this for a few weeks now, I said to hell with it and installed mint 8. Tried to get PloP back on but apparently the menu.lst is obsolete as far as editing, etc. I have since fixed the problem, and doing my last clean install now

Thanks guys!!



-cheers

[mick55]

Glad you got it sorted.

I have never used the hard disk install method.I may have to give it a try.