The common solution for both problems is to tell the Linux kernel to temporarily use an older method to talk to your graphics card, and after you have successfully installed Linux Mint to install a different driver for your graphics card. The steps for this are described below, including screenshots. You can click the screenshots to zoom in, if needed.
If you can't boot successfully from the Linux Mint installation DVD or USB stick.
- At the 10 second countdown screen during boot, press a key.
- You will be shown a small menu. Using the cursor keys of your keyboard highlight the second entry in the menu ("Start in compatibility mode"), and press enter to continue. Note that you can also do an integrity check of the installation image here (if you suspect your DVD wasn't burned correctly or damaged), and a test of your machine's memory.
- If you followed these steps, but you are still unable to boot successfully, please make a new topic for that and ask for help.
- During boot hold down the left shift key to get the GRUB boot menu to show.
- Press the 'e' key to edit the boot parameters. Using the cursor keys of your keyboard scroll down to the line that starts with "linux" (red box in the screenshot) and go to the end of that line (red arrow in the screenshot).
- Add the boot parameters "nomodeset xforcevesa" (without the quotes, see red box in the screenshot). As you type, it will wrap to the next line on the screen and show a backslash character at the end of the previous line. That's fine. Press Ctrl+X or F10 to continue to boot.
- If you followed these steps, but you are still unable to boot successfully, please make a new topic for that and ask for help.
- After successfully booting:
- for Linux Mint 13 and earlier, open the Additional Drivers program from the menu;
- for Linux Mint 14 open the Software Sources program from the menu, then go to the Additional Drivers tab there.
- for Linux Mint 15 open the Driver Manager program from the menu (see: http://www.linuxmint.com/rel_olivia_wha ... intdrivers).
See what graphics card drivers are available for you (my graphics card doesn't need additional drivers, so I can't show any in the screenshot). If you are sure of the one you should install go ahead. But if you need further help with this, please make a new topic in the Graphics Cards & Monitors forum and include the output of the command "inxi -SGx" run from the terminal.
Note that if you have a NVIDIA Optimus graphics card (Intel IGP + NVIDIA GPU), you need Bumblebee. That goes beyond the scope of this topic, but see here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bumblebee. If you have a AMD Hybrid graphics card (Intel IGP + AMD GPU), I don't know the right steps except switch either the one or the other off (in the BIOS to "on-board IGP only" for Intel or "discrete mode" for AMD). For more help if you have multiple graphics cards, please make a new topic in the Graphics Cards & Monitors forum.