Can't Install Mint9 or Ubuntu10.04 SOLVED

[bj218]

I have made 2 cd's & 1dvd of Mint9. None of them will install on my computer but all of them install on my grandson's
computer. I am now running on one drive Ubuntu 9.10 & mint8 I have a 2nd drive with WinXP on it. When I try to install
Mint9 I get 2 screens the 2nd one has the words linuxmint with 5 dots under neath it that change colour after a short time the screen changes to many vertical coloured lines. When I try to install Ubuntu10.04 I end up with blank white screen. What am
i doing wrong?

[SalmonEater]

Without knowing all the details, all I can do is give you a suggestion that I would perform, if I were in your shoes and wanted to get mint-9 (I prefer lxde) on my machine --

Go to sourceforge and downloand and burn the ISO for SystemRescueCD at no more than 8X http://sourceforge.net/projects/systemr ... o/download

Disconnect the Hard drive with XP on it internally & make sure the BIOS is set to "Boot CD" first in boot priority

Reboot with systemrescuecd in the cd-rom drive (i.e. boot to it)

Choose defaults in sysresccd until a multi-colored prompt appears at the bottom of the screen that says 'root'

With only the Hard Drive you want to load mint on attached to the computer, type the following and wait until a message appears that ends in "xx MB/s"

Code: Select all

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=4096 conv=notrunc,sync

Once it is finished and you see the message about bytes in and bytes out ending in a rate of "xx MB/s," type at the prompt

Code: Select all

startx

a yellow-colored terminal should appear, at which you type

Code: Select all

gparted

and begin partitioning. You know the rest, don't you?

Make sure the terminal for / (root) is flagged as "boot" and you're ready to install mint-9 with a clean install.

[edwardr]

It may be a kernel modesetting issue with the new Linux kernel in Mint 9 and Ubuntu 10.04. I had a problem that sounds like yours, earlier versions of Mint and Ubuntu ran from the live cd fine and installed ok, but with Mint 9 and Ubuntu 10.04 the screen faded to a bright greenish/greyish/white color. This was with a laptop, and an external monitor worked fine, it was just the laptop's lcd that would fade out during the boot process.

When installing Mint 9 XFCE, the nomodeset option described below worked for me. When I tried to install Mint LMDE, I had to use radeon.modeset=0 to get it to work. If your video card is not a radeon model, you may need a different boot parameter, as described below.


{the following text is taken from this post} http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... et#p306205

give this a try on your next boot attempt:

If you see the green screen with the various boot options (mint, mint in compatibility mode, memtest, etc) press either <tab> or <e> it will vary with systems. Towards the bottom of the screen you will see a line of text, it may actually be wrapped onto a second line. Add nomodeset at the end of that line, follow the instructions to continue booting. It will probably say press <enter> If not enter the <Ctrl>+x If you are presented with a command prompt, type startx and then hit <enter>

...

If you install you will probably have to go through the same procedure on the next boot. You can then make the changes permanent by following the instructions in this post http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... it#p277057 . This is a fix for problems with Kernel Modesetting, KMS.

Some ATI graphics chips require a different entry for a boot parameter instead of nomodeset. It is stated in the KMS link above.
EDIT: (9.21.10) A Radeon solution not in the above link is to use radeon.modeset=0

Some Intel integrated graphics chips require the boot parameter to be different again, see here. http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... tl#p301144

[bj218]

Without knowing all the details, all I can do is give you a suggestion that I would perform, if I were in your shoes and wanted to get mint-9 (I prefer lxde) on my machine --

Go to sourceforge and downloand and burn the ISO for SystemRescueCD at no more than 8X http://sourceforge.net/projects/systemr ... o/download

Disconnect the Hard drive with XP on it internally & make sure the BIOS is set to "Boot CD" first in boot priority

Reboot with systemrescuecd in the cd-rom drive (i.e. boot to it)

Choose defaults in sysresccd until a multi-colored prompt appears at the bottom of the screen that says 'root'

With only the Hard Drive you want to load mint on attached to the computer, type the following and wait until a message appears that ends in "xx MB/s"

Code: Select all

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=4096 conv=notrunc,sync

Once it is finished and you see the message about bytes in and bytes out ending in a rate of "xx MB/s," type at the prompt

Code: Select all

startx

a yellow-colored terminal should appear, at which you type

Code: Select all

gparted

and begin partitioning. You know the rest, don't you?

Make sure the terminal for / (root) is flagged as "boot" and you're ready to install mint-9 with a clean install.

Please Please help me my 250GB drive is gone. All my linux partitions were on this drive ie
Mint & Ubuntu, plus I have 4 other partitions ie 1 partition with my family & Xmas list,1
partition with all my medical info for the last 10 years,1with the last 10 years of fed/ca
income tax data,1 with Ubuntu/Mint info. that I have downloaded from the internet. I
downloaded this program “Go to sourceforge and download and burn the ISO for System
RescueCD at no more than 8X http://sourceforge.net/projects/systemr ... o/download “ I then burned a CD & ran it when it
displayed a small terminal screen with gparted in it I knew I had a big problem. Why this
program did not warn me at least several times that it was going destroy my drive I don't
understand. Is there any way I might salvage my data?

[edwardr]

The instructions did not include any details on how to use gparted to "add new partitions in unused parts of the disk to add a new operating system" vs "wiping partitions off your disk and losing that data to make room". Looks like the poster assumed you were familiar with partitioning. Unfortunately it looks like you may have removed your data partitions and created a new partition on top of them. You might try posting your question under "Installation & Boot", people on that forum may have seen this type of thing before, and may have advice on how to recover your files.