Linux Mint 18 install (sda vs sda1 solved it)

[ChocolateMint1]

I've now turned the floppy off in the bios, but now it just hangs on boot. It no longer has the floppy seek error. Perhaps I need to flag something else? This is strange.

[ChocolateMint1]

I cannot get this thing to boot. I put the boot drive as the /boot (the 5GB). I wonder did that concept not work? Or is it still some flag in my BIOS or something else wrong? I can't get the computer to boot to the hard drive.

[ChocolateMint1]

I took the fast boot flag off - it probably has nothing to do with it. I have 3 different AHA RAID flags - I don't know, maybe I could play with them. I'm pretty much in over my head.

I don't know why the computer will not boot to the hard-drive.

[ChocolateMint1]

I guess I will have to boot to a GPARTED DVD, then browse the file system some and see if everything looks normal. Then I'll have to do more troubleshooting of the BIOS.

[ChocolateMint1]

I don't know much about computers, but I'm beginning to think that the BIOS on my PC does NOT understand that I have an operating system installed that is bootable. It might not understand the concept of an Ext2 partition. Now I might have to do a whole bunch of reinstalls and experiments. This is too troublesome.

[ChocolateMint1]

I put my Gparted disk in and booted to it. I then chose to boot to the local OS on the hard-drive. It says,

Booting ...
isolinux: Found something at drive = 82
isolinux: Looks reasonable, continuing ...

But now it's just hung up. It' s not booting.

[ChocolateMint1]

My used portion of the / partition I told the installer to install to has only 2.26 GB used, which is exactly how much is
needed for the partition table of a 100 GB drive. There must be no information written to any of my partition. The boot partition has only 155.8MB used which is just table stuff.

I now realize that nothing was written to my hard-drive during the installation of Linux Mint. It just mimicked as if it was installing, but it never installed anything.

And it keeps dropping the nice mount-point labels I create. When I go back into Gparted, there no labels perserved.

I noticed this when I was running the install and had to reconfigure everything.

I have no idea what to do now.

Why doesn't the operating system installation write everything to the hard-drive and why does it mess up my labels?

[ChocolateMint1]

I will go to Youtube and see if I can find help. This is taking too much time but I have to get this finished some time.

[ChocolateMint1]

I think that the Linux Mint installer might not understand the concept of sda1, but only sda. It might be some weird thing like that. But isn't it normal to tell an OS the exact partition for the boot code. There must be something in the original ring of the hard-drive that's referred to as sda, and not sda1. It then jumps from sda to sda1 and starts loading stuff. I will reinstall and just leave it like that and see what happens.

[ChocolateMint1]

I think I will just delete all of my partitions and then start over with only an sda there, and free space. Then simply go through and put in all of the partitions (but still using the Something else radio button). Wow, this will take a while.

[ChocolateMint1]

I tried to reinstall it the same as before but changing only one thing - the sda vs. sda1 option. I guess I bargained for too much in the trial and error process. It just hangs now when it goes to create the ext2 file system for the /boot partition. Apparently, this thing will need to be erased?

[ChocolateMint1]

Why don't the people who wrote the Linux Mint installer just say that you can't have the usual Linux partitioning of:

/boot
/
/home

etc.. It apparently cannot have that structure. Now I'm reinstalling by erasing the disk and it does NOT give you any options to specify partitions. It's just going to put stuff on partitions 1 and 5. Why, I don't know.

It's Copying files now.

I notice that everyone on Youtube just allocates off of sda (new partition table, then / first). But am I supposed to
assume that I MUST put / first? Why?

[michael louwe]

@ ChocolateMint1, .......

...

.
viewtopic.php?f=42&t=122276 (manual partitioning Tutorial for Legacy BIOS mode and ms-dos disks)[use as a guide]

The fix for booting problems for Nvidia/AMD graphics cards ... viewtopic.php?f=46&t=122257
https://linuxmint.com/rel_sonya_cinnamon.php
For Nvidia, if still unsuccessful, try modprobe.blacklist=nouveau

[austin.texas]

I notice that everyone on Youtube just allocates off of sda (new partition table, then / first). But am I supposed to
assume that I MUST put / first? Why?

If you have made partitions before-hand (which is what I do, also), you do have to tell the installation program which partition to use for /

installScreenshot.png

With your Legacy/MBR installation, you do install the bootloader (Grub) to /dev/sda

bootloader-sda.png

[ChocolateMint1]

If this doesn't work, I'll try that. It's almost done the reinstall now, fingers crossed.

I told the program which partitions to use as you've mentioned above.

This time I reached behind and put a wifi adapter in so it's downloading stuff and updating stuff. It's almost done the install.

[ChocolateMint1]

I think it will be ok this time. It's taking much longer because it's doing ALL of the installation . Before, it probably just wrote 18 Sylvia somewhere and stopped and said it was done.

[austin.texas]

I think it will be ok this time. It's taking much longer because it's doing ALL of the installation . Before, it probably just wrote 18 Sylvia somewhere and stopped and said it was done.

There have been instances when the installation fails because at the end of the installation you click on "Reboot" instead of "Continue Testing". It is just a quirk (or bug) in the installation program.

[ChocolateMint1]

I've now rebooted, but this time, it worked!

I did NOT have to use the trick you mentioned for NVidia cards, although thank you for the advice. I guess it was just that I had mapped the boot to sda1. It must be to the boot sector of the hard-drive which is sda logically. I had forgotten that the BIOS has to start somewhere - the BIOS can't jump right to where you've put your OS boot code. It has to have a (pre-OS) piece of code to jump to first to get things going. My mistake.

Sylvia40.jpg

In retrospect, it was my dumb fault all along!

[ChocolateMint1]

When I run blkid now, I only have two partitions: sda1 and sda5. One of them has like 900GB or more. I guess I can always repartition stuff if I don't like that. I guess I don't care that much.

[ChocolateMint1]

Another thought occured to me that if this workstation runs well and will do other things I want it to, I can buy some more of them perhaps, and just don't make any mistakes next time.