Mint 18.2 installer crashing - Intel I7

[wittend]

I have been fighting with installing a fresh copy of Mint for about a week. First I tried installing over an existing copy of 18.1 in a Mini-ITX I7 that I have been using for a couple of years. I had recently been having difficulties with software on this machine, and perhaps (only perhaps) some data errors using USB 2.0 under heavy load.

First I tried to use a USB-3.0 memory stick with an ISO flashed onto it. It would boot, but during the install I would get the message that the installer had crashed. I used FTP, rather than torrent. After trying this several times, finally (yes, belatedly...) I checked the MD5 hash. It did not match. Re-downloading gave the same (exact same!) result. Bad Hash. Aha!

So I used torrent. This time the MD5 did check. I re-flashed the stick (several iterations by now). And booted from it. Started install - same result!

Always at about the same point, just when install gets serious about copying things, after I've entered my timezone, usually while I am entering my username and machine name. This seems about the time the background copy process kicks in. Almost always an IO error, sometimes just errors copying basic utilities - ssh, other stuff. Always ends up with a pretty serious looking fail.

So, bad memory stick? Tried another one. Tried using USB 3.0, USB 2.0. Tried downloading and creating media from an old but reliable (in its way) Windows I7 box. I burned a DVD (remember those?). I diddled every BIOS setting I could think of. Always the same result, even from the DVD. The DVD drive was usb-attached. All my many others have died. Nothing worked.

So I decided it must be the machine. Great excuse to buy a new one. Spent a day driving to the nearest MicroCenter and bought a new ASUS ROG motherboard and an I-7 6 core series 8 CPU, new memory, etc. Built it. SAME result!

Now my only option seems to be to try an AMD MB & CPU a friend has offered. But from the sound of other postings, that won't work either.

This is a bad business for me. I'm stuck.

What do I do?

-d

[wittend]

OBTW - I always forget some stuff:

Using 64 bit
Internal Intel Video ONLY - nothing on bus
Brand New 1 TB target derive
32 GB brand-new RAM

Nothing fiddly or weird done to the BIOS.

-d

[WharfRat]

You might want to try this viewtopic.php?f=46&t=241360&p=1293538&h ... k#p1293538

[wittend]

You might want to try this viewtopic.php?f=46&t=241360&p=1293538&h ... k#p1293538

Thanks, but it didn't help.

I'm going to try to roll back to an earlier version.

-d

[wittend]

i won't say 'solved' yet, but I may have stumbled on the solution.

Perhaps I was supposed to know somehow, but it seems that when I selected 'Compatibility mode' in Grub, things went much better.

Compatible with what? How is someone supposed to know this?

I still have to fight the video driver wars, so time will tell.

-d

[MintBean]

A case of 'RTFM,' or in this case the release notes, my friend. Always worth doing and you still might benefit. In particular, look at the 'nomodeset' option if you're having issues.

https://www.linuxmint.com/rel_sonya_cinnamon.php

Best of luck and let us know if you're successful.

[wittend]

A case of 'RTFM,' or in this case the release notes, my friend. Always worth doing and you still might benefit. In particular, look at the 'nomodeset' option if you're having issues.

https://www.linuxmint.com/rel_sonya_cinnamon.php

Best of luck and let us know if you're successful.

I read them several times, and I didn't (and still don't) see how they refer to my situation.

[wittend]

OK, I will consider this SOLVED. Use the Grub startup option "Compatibility" when booting to install. I see no clear instruction to do this in the release notes, etc, but perhaps it is there somewhere.

-d

[MintBean]

It's mentioned but could be better placed.

Use the "Compatibility mode" to boot and install Linux Mint.