Installation hangs at Codecs screen - <SOLVED> - my experience

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LakeView45
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Installation hangs at Codecs screen - <SOLVED> - my experience

Post by LakeView45 »

I finally got Mint to install in my 11 year old Dell Vostro 1520 laptop with Windows 7 Pro after a few days of real frustration. The key for me turned out to be eliminating partitions. As with other people on the form with a similar problem, Mint ran just fine from the live USB stick, but would hang at the Media Codecs screen and not install. Just got stuck and hung there. At one point I let it run at that spot for three hours with no change. I thought that there must be something wrong with the Live USB drive. I was wrong.
Over the course of three days. I tried creating the Mint live USB drive using different downloads of the ISO file and using several different live USB creation programs including Rufus, Linux Live USB Creator, Etcher, and others. I hunted in this forum for ideas and came on others with the same problem.
Some suggested not connecting to the internet while installing but that did hot work for me. Some suggested not downloading the codecs when that screen appears, but again, that made no difference. I tried proceeding with internet connected or not and codecs download selected or not and combinations of both or not.
I am not technically schooled in the inner workings of computers and know enough to get in trouble but enjoy with process. The clue that eventually worked for me was a comment in the forum about problems installing Mint when there are partitions. I know very little about partitions. I found that typing "disk" in the Win 7 start/search/run showed a utility dealing with creating and formatting hard disk partitions. Typing diskmgmt.msc brought it up directly. It showed there were three partitions. One was labeled Recovery and the others were both labeled Primary. The recovery partition was about 40GB. One primary partition had about 15GB and indicated it had some boot files or folders. The last partition was about 320GB.
I played with that utility and tried to delete the recovery partition. That succeeded in deleting that item but the 40GB still showed up separately. Also tried formatting that partition to wipe it. Then I tried again to install Mint and hung at the Codecs screen. I tried to use the Extend command to join the partition to the one next to it to the right, without success.
What finally worked for me was a tool called MiniTool Partition Wizard Free that I found and and installed. I suppose that there are others that will do the same but this is the one that I found and used. That tool when loaded gives a variety of options for deal with the partitions.
Recalling the other forum commentator saying that Mint would sometimes not install where there were partitions, I decided to remove them. There was eventually a warning that doing so might prevent the computer from booting but I decided to try it anyway. After all, I had replaced this trusty laptop with a shiny new Dell XPS 15 a few months ago. This Vostro had been having problems for the past year - running slower and worse. However, recently after running some corrective utility programs within Windows it unexpectedly came back to life and was working well. I had created a repair and recovery disk and disk image and also had the original Windows 7 Pro installation disk that came with the Vostro so figured if I bricked it, I could get it going again.
So, I opened the MiniTool Partition program, right clicked on Disk1 and told it to Delete All Partitions. By the way, when you do that, you must click the "Apply" button at the bottom of the left hand column for your selected action to take effect. It did and the program showed no more partitions just the one disk.
I shut down and restarted and got a black screen. It would no longer boot into Windows 7. I inserted the Mint Live USB drive and tried again, hitting F12 as the computer started to run and getting the boot options to start from the USB stick. Mint Life USB started as before. I selected the installation icon, and the Mint installation program started This time, I decided to connect to the internet. Then got to the add Media Codecs screen and decided to check the option to download codecs. Then hit continue. After a couple minutes, installation went past the Codecs screen and proceeded perfectly. I now have a smoothly running Linux Mint 20 Cinnamon laptop. I am impressed how quickly and nicely it performs. Just my experience in case someone is going through similar frustrations. Of course the caution is that if you do what I did, you might brick you computer if things go wrong and you do not have installation media to reinstall the prior operating system or for some reason cannot restore the prior system. Good luck!
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
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