Best edition for an older computer?Mint 9 won't boot[Solved]

[Spalding]

I am getting very frustrated - I can install Mint 9 Fluxbox, Ubuntu 10.04, and Ubuntu 8, but none of them will boot! All I get is that darn grub recover prompt!

Previously I had no trouble at all with a fresh Ubuntu 8 install. I suspect my problem is a combination of the partitioning and GRUB2. I know Ubuntu 8 was absolutely great, but ever since I upgraded to 9 it was buggy. (That other disc crashed so I have to start over). Right now I am running from the Ubuntu 8 live CD with awesome performance. When I try to do that with Ubuntu 10.04 or Mint 9, it runs horribly slow.

But in any case, is Mint 9 Fluxbox the best edition for a PIII 866 MHz, 512 MB RAM machine? The only real performance problem I ever had with Ubuntu 8 and 9 was Open Office was unusable since it took FOREVER to load, I assume due to the low amount of RAM and maybe also the very slow old disc drive that is thankfully gone now. My main goal is ease of use and performance on limited hardware, but even so, I wonder of the Debian edition may be worth a try, in hopes that it has a better installation program? Or maybe one of the other lightweight editions?

So for the specifics of my booting problem, my disc has an old Windows XP on the first 150 GB and Linux in the last 10 GB, and I think the problem lies in the partitioning done with the installers. Below is the output of sudo fdisk -l for the Mint 9 installation - on startup I get unknown filesystem and a grub recover prompt. I made a change in that at first I was using logical partitions and I always got the error "no such partition", then I switched to primary partitions and now I get the current error, so at least SOMETHING is changing!

Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00eb00eb

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 17953 144202208+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 19388 19458 558081 5 Extended
/dev/sda3 * 17953 19388 11528192 83 Linux
/dev/sda5 19388 19458 558080 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Partition table entries are not in disk order
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$

[oobetimer]

Probably this is a BIOS-limit issue.

http://linux-sxs.org/administration/limits.html

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Large-Disk-HOWTO-5.html

http://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.p ... opic=11684

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/bios/sizeGB128-c.html

[Spalding]

Thank you, oobetimer! This shows that a little human help is sometimes needed when Uncle Google strikes out. In nearly a week of searching I never thought of that or came across that diagnosis. Maybe I shoudl have concentrated on searching for OLD computer Linux boot problems.. I guess in the back of my mind a 2000 model computer doesn't go back to those bad old days of limits, but I guess it does.

I haven't thoroughly read the links yet, but I don't ever need to boot windows again. But, I want to keep the data in that windows partition, so hopefully I can find a way to do that in those links.

[Spalding]

OK, I think my best course of action will be to swap out the newer 160 GB drive for the old 40GB that came with this computer to get the best match of vintages of technology, a good thing to keep in mind I suppose!

This way I can just dedicate the whole drive to Linux and keep it simple. And I guess I'll do the separate data partition thing while I'm at it to hopefully avoid future further problems with upgrades and backups, etc.