Hangs/Crashes when booting from Installation DVD

[DrunkyMcStumble]

I just downloaded the Linux Mint 14 Nadia, 64-bit Cinnamon ISO from the main website, burnt it onto a DVD using Imgburn, then rebooted to the DVD. The "Automatic Boot in 10 sec..." splash screen comes up fine, but then, after waiting the 10 seconds, the screen goes black, flashes as if changing to a different display mode, and then just hangs forever; unresponsive to key-presses or the reset/power button on the front panel.

I tried each of the options on the automatic boot menu, including "Start Linux Mint", "Start in Compatibility Mode" and "Integrity Check" and each time got the same result - a few seconds into it and the whole system just freezes.

Very frustrating, since I can't even tell if there's something it doesn't like with my hardware configuration or if it's just a bad image or burn.

[turboscrew]

Now that you didn't mention, you have 64-bit CPU?
Have you checked the image against the checksum from the download site (MD5 or SHA)?

[DrunkyMcStumble]

Well, I installed the CPU myself, so I'm pretty sure it's 64 bit.

Checksum is 1b103578411b421cc012cddf3253e32c, which is exactly what the website says it should be: http://www.linuxmint.com/edition.php?id=118

Since I'm only getting a blank screen, there's no error codes or anything I can report. I'm going to try re-burning the DVD, but I don't think that's the problem. Would it be worth downloading the install ISO for version 13 then just manually updating to 14.1 once I'm got it properly installed on my system?

[catweazel]

I'll lay an egg if you don't have an nVidia video card.

[DrunkyMcStumble]

Funny you should mention that... it's a GeForce GTX 260. Is that bad?

By the way, I just tried installing Linux Mint ver 13 and had exactly the same problem.

[catweazel]

Funny you should mention that... it's a GeForce GTX 260. Is that bad?

It would have been bad for me if it wasn't an nVidia.

First, try starting Mint with vga=771 as a kernel parameter. For example:

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quiet splash vga=771

[DrunkyMcStumble]

But how do I do that if I'm booting from a DVD? I can edit the parameter file if it's installed on my harddrive, but the problem is I can't even get to that point.

[DrunkyMcStumble]

OK, so I don't know what's changed since last week but, feeling particularly stubbon, I tried the install again today and got the following message when I attempted to boot normally from the DVD:

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ata-id[314]:HDIO_GET_IDENTITY failed for '/dev/sdc/':Invalid Argument

Note that I've had to transcribe this from what I wrote down, so there may be typos, etc. Anyway, that was it: just a single line at the top of a blank grey rectangle that covered about 2/3rds of my monitor. At that point my system completely froze.

Next I tried booting in Compatability Mode and, after happily scrolling through a few screenfuls of stuff, the system came to a crashing halt with these messages:

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ata7.00: exception Emask 0x52 SAct 0x0 SErr 0xffffffff action 0xe frozen
ata7: SError: { RecovData RecovComm UnrecovData Persist Proto Hos tInit PHYRdyChg PHYInt CommWake 10B8B Dispar BadCRC Handshk LinkSeq TrStaTrns Unr ecFIS DevExch }
ata7.00: failed command: IDENTIFY PACKET DEVICE
ata7.00: cmd a1/00:01:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/00 tag 0 pio 512 in
         res 40/00:02:00:00:02/00:00:00:00:00/00 Emask 0x56 (ATA bus error)
ata7.00: status: { DRDY }
ata: hard resetting link

Any ideas? Because of the mention of ATA in the errors, I've tried fiddling with my HDD & SDD settings in the BIOS, updated my firmware as well as disconnecting all USB drives and other peripherals but still no luck.

[monkeyboy]

Do you have SATA or IDE optical drive and can you boot from a USB drive?