Is my PC too Old?

[bob466]

Sounds like it's time for a new build. ...Floppy Drive ?

[marx404]

Now I'll get out of the way so that rene, Pierre and others can do proper forensic work on the likely reasons - graphics card or whatever - for this particular problem.

I was personally in fact also already out of here, having gotten no response on the "safe boot" / nomodeset thingy...

Rene, my time is limited, so apologies for the long response. Finally got time tonight, burned a new DVD and USB. For whatever reason, cannot boot to USB despite BIOS setting set correctly. Did "nomodeset", it crashed upon boot to DVD, tons of errors, too many to write down. Did get this before it froze again, after what seemed like 5 minutes of scrolling errors:

[ 223.391366] ---end Kernel Panic - not syncing: Attempt to kill init!
exit code = 0x00007f00
[ 223.391366]

So...I'm pretty much done here, open to any other suggestions, just pls keep in mind that I may not get time to respond immediately. Thank everyone for their help.

[rene]

Did get this before it froze again, after what seemed like 5 minutes of scrolling errors:

[ 223.391366] ---end Kernel Panic - not syncing: Attempt to kill init!

It was actually 3 minutes and 43.391366 seconds...

There's unfortunately little to be said from just that bit other than, perhaps, this perhaps not being a graphics issue after all. I'd personally start trying to boot with e.g. "noapic" as a kernel parameter (which could already be part of that "Safe Boot" choice from the ISO Grub menu...) but have nothing directly useful to add otherwise.

[rene]

Actually, vaguely recalling something wrt. early Nvidia chipsets. I believe the iommu=soft kernel parameter may be one of the better tries. Also see if your BIOS mentions anything about an IOMMU or VT-d... something concerning virtualization.

[vansloneker]

Try to disconnect the hard disk and DVD then boot from usb. On an Asus probably the boot menu is called with F8. Does it still not boot?

Other things to try:
-in the bios what is the primary graphics setting?
-remove memory modules, try them one by one.
-remove everything else try to boot with as little hardware as possible.

[marx404]

Actually, vaguely recalling something wrt. early Nvidia chipsets. I believe the iommu=soft kernel parameter may be one of the better tries. Also see if your BIOS mentions anything about an IOMMU or VT-d... something concerning virtualization.

So, just for fun, before I dashed out for work, I D/L the latest LMDE booted live to DVD (USB still not seen during BIOS boot, dunno why). All seemed to go well, until it froze upon the logo splash screen. I pressed ESC and init errors everywhere. Wish I had time to write them down. Bummed and disgusted, but feeling blessed that my 17.3 is still running strong!

rene - no such settings in my BIOS as mentioned above.

So, for now, thank you everyone for your efforts, much appreciated, I will try this at another time.

[Bobb24]

I have the same processor and 4GB DDR2 ram in a couple of machines and neither of them have ever given me problems with 64bit 18.3 Cinnamon or Mate. I have an AMD video card , nothing special but they both allow me to watch videos , surf the net etc. Definitely not too old for Mint

[jimallyn]

Did you try Compatibility Mode? Did you try using the nomodeset parameter? You have to edit the boot parameters to do that. Do you get to the point where it displays "Booting in 10 seconds" (or something like that)? If so, press any key and you will get some options. Try "Start in compatibility mode." If that doesn't work, then boot again to try the nomodeset kernel parameter. Get to that menu again by pressing any key at the "Booting in 10 seconds" prompt, then press Tab and add nomodeset at the end of the line of kernel parameters shown, then press Enter. Does that do it? I believe you would try the iommu=soft parameter just as I described for nomodeset. That machine should run any current version of Mint, we just need to find out which magical incantation it wants in order to finish booting. Some computers just like to be difficult, but in Linux we have lots of ways to overcome that! It is exceedingly rare that Linux gets beat on issues like that.

[marx404]

Thanks, I will give these a try as time permits me to. Yes, i did try nomodeset, no luck. What baffles me the most is my PC and all HW are running along perfectly on the current installation of 17.3 Cinnamon. So, at this point, I am suspect either is having issues due to incompatability.

What I think I might try for shyts and giggles is to live boot a 17.3 Cinnamon DVD and see what happens. As I already am running this OS ver, if it hiccups then I can narrow it down from there.

Not going to happen for a while, so may be some time for a reply, best as I can. Thanks again everyone for your efforts.
Been using LM for 5 yrs, Love It! not ready to give in yet!

[vansloneker]

...What I think I might try for shyts and giggles is to live boot a 17.3 Cinnamon DVD and see what happens. As I already am running this OS ver, if it hiccups then I can narrow it down from there.
...

Good plan!
I am currently on my Asus M3N78-VM with AMD Athlon64X2-5000+ and 4GB DDR2. Works good. Not perfect, but Mint 18.3 XFCE works pretty well on it. I am stuck as to what is wrong with your system, just hope you will be able to resolve it.

[larjan]

I am running 19.1 cinnamon on a Q6600, 4G DDR2 Ram, ATI 4870 GPU, and a WD rapter HDD. It runs great! I would try to boot your install media on another machine if possible, just to insure it is good. There might be a setting in the bios that says usb configuration. If there is, set it to hdd emulation. This will allow you to boot from a flash drive. It was common on asus boards back then. Though it is possible, I don't think your GPU is your problem. Also you have a 64bit cpu. You may need to look at the errors and/or post them for some help. Your machine should be fine running mint 19.

[marx404]

UPDATE - So, finally had time to live boot 17.x Cinnamon 32 bit from my orig install DVD.

Live Boot ran perfectly. No glitches whatsoever. So, I am at my wit's end on this. Can anybody tell me what has changed since 17.3 Cinnamon?
I am unable to install anything beyond 17.3. By process of elimination, this tells me its not my computer at this point, if 17.3 runs perfectly and I can boot to and run the same on a live DVD...

My specs are at the top of this thread.

Something major has changed since 17.3. Since Quiana (2014) through Rosa have been based upon Ubuntu Trusty, and I am unable to install or live boot past that, what is it that has changed since Xenial that does not agree with my PC?

[rene]

Why did you try 32-bit? You already knew Mint 17 32-bit was working did you not? The (slightly) interesting test would've been 17.3 64-bit. Booting with the iommu=soft kernel parameter would be the as far as I'm concerned most interesting one (same way as when adding "nomodeset").

[marx404]

In booting with the exact same DVD I installed Mint 17 with, I think that I isolated any hardware or install issues.
Also, just for fun, I d/l and live booted the most recent Kali Lite (xfce) 64 bit and it ran perfectly.

So, something with mint is not happy with my computer.

[vansloneker]

The 19 kernel does have a lot of legacy stuff removed. For older hardware often a version below 19 is recommended. On the other hand, people successfully booted and installed 19 on older hardware.
It seems to me this is your one and only PC and you don't have a spare machine or hardware to do some testing on different hardware configurations. That makes it hard to come to a conclusion.

Some things just don't work. Every now and then I also run into an unsolvable issue. After trying everything there is no other option but to leave it and take another direction, even if it is very hard to do so.

[turboscrew]

My suggestions on that HW would be Slackware or Lubuntu.
Slackware probably fits fine and is still a full distro.
Maybe even Debian runs with some lighter DE.

If Slackware doesn't run, I suspect faulty HW.