Installation issues

[Rich J]

Hi Everyone!

I am currently running Ubuntu 11.10 (via WUBI) alongside Vista Home Prem SP2 and Ubuntu sits on it's own partition. I'm finding Ubuntu a step too far and would like to replace it with Mint as I've read that Mint is more user friendly to those looking to migrate from Windows?

I've downloaded both v11 Katya and v12 Lisa and both files check out ok with .MD5 checksum. I've burned both to DVD as ISO files. Now the problem......I can't run either dvd's as live.

On boot up, the loader gets to the 2nd line (Caspar) then hangs. I can't get to the welcome screen to either run the live DVD or to overwrite ubuntu with Mint. I had a similar problem with Ubuntu where GRUB wouldn't install so had to install it via WUBI. Is there something similar I could use with Mint? Do I have to run the live dvd via Windows or can I do it in Ubuntu? Any pointers to where I'm going wrong?

Long-term I wish to move to Linux permanently and I'm trying different distro's to that end. Though I've read up a lot on the 'net, I'm still very much a Linux beginner! Any help would be most appreciated!

Thanks in advance

Rich

[xenopeek]

Can you share what graphics card you have? Probably that one is the problem. You may try from the Live DVD: press a key at the countdown screen during boot, then press Tab to edit the boot parameters, and on the line of text that appeared change "quiet splash" to "nomodeset" (without the quotes). See if this allows you to boot the Live DVD.

[Rich J]

Can you share what graphics card you have? Probably that one is the problem. You may try from the Live DVD: press a key at the countdown screen during boot, then press Tab to edit the boot parameters, and on the line of text that appeared change "quiet splash" to "nomodeset" (without the quotes). See if this allows you to boot the Live DVD.

Hi Vincent, thank you for the reply.

I tried editing the boot parameters as you instructed but Mint still hangs at ..........'Loading /casper/initrd.lz............ (2nd line of sequence)

2 points have occurred to me - 1/ is there a way to save the new setting or does it revert to default on every startup?
2/ can I expect the boot sequence to act immediately or is there a delay? (I mean, should I wait a while and let the loader do it's thing?)

My graphics card is an NVidia GeForce 8500 GT - as far as I remember, I didn't have this issue when trying out Ubuntu but it has been a while..................!

Thanks again for your help

Rich

[RETNUH]

I'm not sure if I'm going in the right direction here or not but I'll give it a shot.

How did you burn the .iso? Did you use a software meant for burning disk images(.iso)? If not give it another try using Imgburn.

Also how long a are you waiting? I'd say wait at least 5 minutes to be sure.

[mintybits]

For anyone who is interested and has the patience...you can check whether the actual disk has been burned properly by finding its md5 checksum and comparing it to the original iso file.

Boot into Ubuntu.
Insert the Mint CD/DVD.
Find it...it is probably located in /dev/sr0 or maybe /dev/cdrom: in a terminal try
~$ ls -l /dev/sr0
brw-rw----+ 1 root cdrom 11, 0 2012-02-03 10:50 /dev/sr0

Then find the size of the original iso file that you used to burn the CD/DVD (use your path)
~$ ls -l /.../linuxmint-12-gnome-cd-nocodecs-64bit.iso
-r--r--r-- 1 user group 664682496 2012-01-22 15:54 /.../linuxmint-12-gnome-cd-nocodecs-64bit.iso

The number in red is the size of the iso file in bytes. This will also be the size of the data on the CD/DVD. Divide this number by 2048 to give the number of blocks of bytes written to the CD/DVD. 664682496 / 2048 = 324552.

Now read the bytes off the CD/DVD and send them to md5sum
~$ dd if=/dev/sr0 bs=2048 count=324552 | md5sum
324552+0 records in
324552+0 records out
664682496 bytes (665 MB) copied, 131.08 s, 5.1 MB/s
641e0ab8f746b82c36fc3f0bbca70dc7 -

Then compare with the original iso file
~$ md5sum /.../linuxmint-12-gnome-cd-nocodecs-64bit.iso
641e0ab8f746b82c36fc3f0bbca70dc7 /.../linuxmint-12-gnome-cd-nocodecs-64bit.iso

[sagirfahmid3]

I don't think it's got something to do with the .iso. It's something with the graphics card. I have a GT 430 I had something similar to this problem; when starting Mint up, it would get frozen on a blinking "_" underscore. Thing is, I could get into the compatibility mode so AlbertP told me to add a PPA to the software sources.

Quoted by Albert from like 3 months ago:

Please open Software Sources, add ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates, then close and refresh. In case it doesn't offer to refresh you can go to Package Manager and click refresh. Then you can install nVidia's graphics driver, from Additional Drivers. When that program does not offer you the "current version" you can get nvidia-current with Software or Package Manager.

That fixed my issue. Try it for yourself and see if it works, worth a shot right?

[Rich J]

Success! I managed to install Lisa via Mint4Win with no issues and am now on the learning curve! I'm amazed at the depth and quality of the build and the speed of response compared to Windows. I particularly like the 'cleanness' of the look of the desktop and the way that the features are organized - and the number of programs available is incredible!

Thanks to all who replied, please watch this space as I'm sure to be back on a regular basis!

Newbie/probable convert!

Rich

[Rich J]

Hi All - it's been a while but I've at last solved the problem of installation disks 'hanging' at boot up. If you get an error message along the lines of "not enough memory to load specified image" or similar, or the disk just hangs at a black screen, take a look at this link.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions ... ge-898197/

It's a refence to graphics not specifically installation - but, I think it means that on certain, older, systems an amount of memory was 'reserved' to allow older applications to run, thus depriving the system of memory when running bigger apps. Look in your BIOS for something along the lines of 'memory hole' (it's in Super BIOS on my system) and make sure it is checked disabled . Save and exit and your installation should proceed ok.

Thanks to all for your help

Rich