[SOLVED] What's wrong with my attempts? - Gparted dies..

[gosa]

Hi All!

Not really sure if this is a newbie question or if I should direct it to the part that handles Installation and Boot, but here goes:

I'm attempting to install Linux Mint onto one of my hard drives. The setup is as follows:

I have chosen to have three hard drives in my computer, built on an Asus P7P55D Motherboard equipped with a Core i7 860 with 8GB of Ram. My Graphics card is NVidia ENGT430. The Drives are all 500GB SATA drives from Seagate.

For this install my choice was to remove my drive with Windows 7 as well as my drive with Snow Leopard, leaving me with one drive left (prefer to use F8 when booting instead of mixing the three OS's up in one bootloader.)

So, I wrote Linux Mint 9 xfce (x64 version) to an usb stick with Unetbootin, plugged in and booted up the live environment. - No problem so far.

I fire up the installer, choose Country, set my keyboard and then it stops. All I have is the "spinning" of the pointer, and it goes on forever. After a while I grow tired of that, so I reboot the computer and try again. - Same problem.

Now I've tried this with Linux Mint 10 and the Above 9 xfce with the same results. After scratching my head for a while I finally decided to start up gparted (don't ask me why - just did). When I do it through the menu it shuts down as soon as it opens. When I run it through Terminal I get the following message:

Code: Select all

mint@mint ~ $ sudo gparted
======================
libparted : 2.3
======================
Backtrace has 15 calls on stack:
  15: /lib/libparted.so.0(ped_assert+0x31) [0x7f79c10275c1]
  14: /lib/libparted.so.0(+0x392f6) [0x7f79c10522f6]
  13: /lib/libparted.so.0(+0x39a73) [0x7f79c1052a73]
  12: /lib/libparted.so.0(+0x3a72d) [0x7f79c105372d]
  11: /lib/libparted.so.0(ped_disk_add_partition+0x1cb) [0x7f79c102dd3b]
  10: /lib/libparted.so.0(+0x3bc74) [0x7f79c1054c74]
  9: /lib/libparted.so.0(+0x3be65) [0x7f79c1054e65]
  8: /lib/libparted.so.0(ped_disk_new+0x75) [0x7f79c102e815]
  7: /usr/sbin/gpartedbin() [0x44a884]
  6: /usr/sbin/gpartedbin() [0x45a721]
  5: /usr/sbin/gpartedbin() [0x477ec7]
  4: /usr/lib/libglibmm-2.4.so.1(+0x383f2) [0x7f79bfaac3f2]
  3: /lib/libglib-2.0.so.0(+0x697e4) [0x7f79beef57e4]
  2: /lib/libpthread.so.0(+0x7971) [0x7f79be4d7971]
  1: /lib/libc.so.6(clone+0x6d) [0x7f79be23392d]
Assertion (head_size <= 63) at ../../../libparted/labels/dos.c:662 in function probe_partition_for_geom() failed.

So... what's my next step in this?

What I also know is that I also ran Gparted on a alpha version of Crunchbang, and that one worked fine.

Ironically - I had no problem installing Mac OS X Snow Leopard on this computer, making it into a perfect Hackintosh, that manages to pick up all my hardware (Tablet, Printer, and even my Graphics Card - admittedly with some "cheating", but still)

So what's wrong with that picture? Why doesn't Mint want to dance with Windows 7 and the Snow Leopard? "Three is a crowd", or what?

Thanks in advance,
Gosa

Edit: Seems like LMDE likes my computer a bit better, so I guess I'll try to install that one instead. Would be nice to know what the problem was though...

[gosa]

Adding info from lspci:

Code: Select all

mint@mint ~ $ lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor DMI (rev 11)
00:03.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor PCI Express Root Port 1 (rev 11)
00:08.0 System peripheral: Intel Corporation Core Processor System Management Registers (rev 11)
00:08.1 System peripheral: Intel Corporation Core Processor Semaphore and Scratchpad Registers (rev 11)
00:08.2 System peripheral: Intel Corporation Core Processor System Control and Status Registers (rev 11)
00:08.3 System peripheral: Intel Corporation Core Processor Miscellaneous Registers (rev 11)
00:10.0 System peripheral: Intel Corporation Core Processor QPI Link (rev 11)
00:10.1 System peripheral: Intel Corporation Core Processor QPI Routing and Protocol Registers (rev 11)
00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset USB2 Enhanced Host Controller (rev 06)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset High Definition Audio (rev 06)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 1 (rev 06)
00:1c.4 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 5 (rev 06)
00:1c.5 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 6 (rev 06)
00:1c.6 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 7 (rev 06)
00:1c.7 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 8 (rev 06)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset USB2 Enhanced Host Controller (rev 06)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 PCI Bridge (rev a6)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series Chipset LPC Interface Controller (rev 06)
00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset 6 port SATA AHCI Controller (rev 06)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset SMBus Controller (rev 06)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation Device 0de1 (rev a1)
01:00.1 Audio device: nVidia Corporation Device 0bea (rev a1)
02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller (rev 03)
03:00.0 SATA controller: JMicron Technology Corp. JMB362/JMB363 Serial ATA Controller (rev 03)
03:00.1 IDE interface: JMicron Technology Corp. JMB362/JMB363 Serial ATA Controller (rev 03)
07:02.0 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 62)
07:02.1 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 62)
07:02.2 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB 2.0 (rev 65)
07:04.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6306/7/8 [Fire II(M)] IEEE 1394 OHCI Controller (rev c0)

[pythagorean]

Well, the standard thing to say, which I myself have been told in forums numerous times... there must be something wrong with iso... so check the checksum or download a new one and start over.

But who really cares about that. I have downloaded iso files five and six times before I got one that would actually install correctly. The real question is:

YOU SHOULD POST A HOW TO ABOUT HOW YOU GOT THAT SNOW LEOPARD TO INSTALL because I have been trying to do that with Virtualbox for the last year on and off and I have never gotten anywhere.

[unexistance]

Hi,

It seems the error you got is a recently known bug

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... bug/558431

hard to say whether it's fixed or not ...

Regards,

[gosa]

Hi again,

Late last night I finally managed... I decided to search some of the expressions in my error message (don't know if I can call it a crash log or similar).

It turned out that this problem is indeed related to that known bug that unexistance is referring to, and it is quite easy to overcome - at least for my needs.
All I had to do was to change the way I transferred my iso to usb-stick. I've always used Unetbootin for that, which didn't work in this case. Instead I changed to the "Universal usb installer" that's referred to at the Ubuntu download page. http://www.pendrivelinux.com/downloads/ ... taller.exe

With that one I could finally install Linux Mint 9 xfce. It does look like I have to start over again with it though... having some issues with Nvidia drivers that is way to hard to overcome for this newbie, so I think I might have to try something else...

pythagorean: Can't really help you with Virtualbox and Snow Leopard, but as for making a real install of it you should try http://www.tonymacx86.com/ They have a boot disk that overcomes some of the initial problems with installing Snow Leopard, as well as some tools to fix your installation after you have booted the OS. Of course you still need compatible hardware, but if you have it is actually quite easy.

[pythagorean]

As for the nVidia drivers, everyone has that problem in the beginning, but with mint and ubuntu there is the little window that pops up and tells you that there are proprietary drivers available and then it just installs them. The hardest thing about all of that is that you then have to open the nvidia control panel as root to make changes to your display configuration. Somewhat ridiculous process but that's the best you will get for using intel/nvidia with Linux. Try doing it in Fedora. Nightmare.

Thanks for the link to tonymac. I guess I had seen that before when I bumped into iBoot online. It only works with intel machines. I never buy intel. My main computer is an AMD Phenom II x2 555 Black Edition which I got on sale at Microcenter for 84 dollars. Try getting 3.8 gigahertz out of an intel processor for less that 100 dollars. I can burn this one up overclocking, then buy another, and I still haven spent what an intel would cost.

Incidentally, and not to be too much of an evangelist for virtual machines, but there really isn't any virtue to running linux on bare metal, especially if you are battling the proprietary drivers. You might as well just download VMware player or Virtualbox and run linux in there because otherwise you are going to constantly watch your drivers/system die when you update or just for random reasons and you will be installing and reinstalling over and over. In a virtual machine, there are NONE of those issues with Linux, especially with Mint/Ubuntu because, unlike fedora, they work well with usb in a virtual machine.

I personally think bare metal installs for linux are somewhat retro. Virtualize it and you have none of the problems with drivers AT ALL.

[gosa]

As for the nVidia drivers, everyone has that problem in the beginning, but with mint and ubuntu there is the little window that pops up and tells you that there are proprietary drivers available and then it just installs them. The hardest thing about all of that is that you then have to open the nvidia control panel as root to make changes to your display configuration.

I'm not sure that applies to all versions of Mint... After running the Live DVD of Linux Mint 10 with that window popping up on me I've been waiting for the same to happen with my LM 9 xfce install... but it just never happens. Don't know if it's a difference between gnome/xfce versions or if the difference is between LM 9 & 10 or between x86/x64 or all of it at the same time...

I did get some advice on how to get my drivers installed in LMDE so I might just try that one instead... The good side of it all is that I have an empty disk with nothing to loose, so I can start over again a couple of times. The boring side of it is that it does take time.

And - yes. I have been contemplating just giving this tries the finger and set up a Virtualbox install instead... I do have one now that I'm "experimenting" with, so to take the step to a full 24/7 install isn't that far away...