Mint 17.1 Install Pauses At Partitioning For 12 Hours.

I downloaded Mint and burnt it to a CD. The computer boots up fine with the CD, goes to the Mint home screen, but when I try to install it and partition the hard drive to run next to Windows Vista, the screen completely garbles (green background with short different colored horizontal lines all over it). Is this normal? Should I let it run for a while and it will clear up? How long can I expect the partitioning to take?

Since I have not found a solution to my intermittent boot problem I'm thinking of reinstalling Linux Mint, switching to a different Linux distribution, or turning back to the dark side, i.e. Windows. This was my first Linux install and I was really impressed with the OS and the applications. I like Linux Mint but I want a reliable computer and if I cannot even get it to boot properly then that's a long-term concern.

The problem with a reinstall of Linux Mint is that I don't know what to do differently. I don't know what, if anything, I did wrong the first time. Of course, switching to a different distribution is also a crap shoot since I don't know what went wrong with Mint. I don't really want to go back to Windows but it's been a stable, reliable OS for me for years.

Anyone have any advice?

I have installed linux(mint and ubuntu) on a few laptops, but i have an ASUS eEEE netbook PC..Atom processor...No DVD drive...

I have chosen PUPPY Linux distro, and I have booted from a thumb a few times to make sure everything seems to work....but...when I start trying to install...well...its asking me about using the partition tool to change the types of partitions that are best for linux...

I am not understanding the instructions...as far as what i need to do...has anybody done this install ,,,the current netbook OS is Windows Starter 7. I just want to REPLACE it entirely with linux puppy. I did not encounter this on my laptop installs..i just said yes...replace the current OS..but somehow the netbook install is acting different....do i need to change the partitions or can i just take the defaults...I forge the exact partition extentsions..something line ntfs and it says to change to ext2 and ext3...not sure how to do that...

Can some direct me to the best way to do this? thx.

I recently wiped Windows 8 off my laptop and installed Linux Mint; I selected the 'wipe everything/install Linux Mint' option, and I've got Mint working....but:

My Mint partition is about 45GB; it's a 1TB drive, and I've got a partition or two that I can't seem to do anything with. I can't expand my Mint partition; I've tried putzing around with the other partition and split it into two, but I can only look at them, can't save things to them. When I use Dolphin and put in a test file with just some random text on one then reboot my computer, it's gone.

Here's the results of a df -k command:

Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda6 48991048 11277504 35201880 25% /
none 4 0 4 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
udev 4014028 4 4014024 1% /dev
tmpfs 805912 1352 804560 1% /run
none 5120 0 5120 0% /run/lock
none 4029560 15044 4014516 1% /run/shm
none 102400 8 102392 1% /run/user
/dev/sda3 118782228 60984 112664388 1% /media/joshandkaren/8495904f-0de8-4cf9-b169-2c86a79ade35
/dev/sda1 776984056 70296 737422180 1% /media/joshandkaren/9db04a44-79dd-470f-8d54-508c3d852657


When I do an ls -al command on either /media folder on either partition, there's also a + sign at the very end of the listing (drwx...+) and I don't know what that means or signifies.


I'm obviously not hurting for space on my main Mint partition, but it would be nice to have the whole drive, of course. Does anyone have any notion of what I did wrong and how I might be able to 'open up' my partitions in order to get that space back/useable? I'm not averse to reinstalling/wiping everything and starting again; also, I'd goofed something up when trying to dual-boot Win8 and Mint, so I just decided to wipe everything and stick with Mint solo. I had an instance where I was only able to bring up the 'grub rescue' prompt, whereupon I'd simply reinstalled Mint from the DVD, so I wonder if that has anything to do with it.....

Any input would be appreciated, thank you!

Did it again!

Last week, with help from this forum, I was able to install Linux Mint 17.1 dual boot with Windows 8.1. It worked so well, I decided to explore other Linux distros recommended by forum members as some I wanted to check out.

I was using Unetbootin to download and install these as live sessions on my Windows 8.1 partition.

On my last such download, something went wrong, and no doubt I caused the error, but no clue as to how.

When I opened up this PC, I got the normal dual boot option for Windows and Mint. When I selected Windows, I found an additional dual boot option between it and Unetbootin! Somehow I created a partition (?) on my C Drive for Unetbootin (see Thumbnail below).
This Unetbootin option only goes to a page for me to choose another OS. Further, when I rebooted, the Windows/Mint dual boot option no longer existed, just the Windows/Unetbootin one.

Been checking out various articles and websites about BCD/MBR repair, but nothing definitive (that I can understand) about modifying these to delete the Unetbootin partition and restoring the Windows/linux dual boot.

Naturally, this is a newbie land mine area, so I'm very reluctant to try anything I can't fully understand, which is the category everything I've Googled on this topic falls into.

Anyone know how I can resolve this short of a complete start over
installation based on steps that basically a PC fence post can follow?

TIA
Cheers!

Hi all,

As you can probably tell I am new to Linux and new to the forum, I am using Kali and Mint both as live Linux environments on USB drives, all is good and I am finding my way around, the reason for the post is that I need to copy 15 CF cards that have multiple partitions, Windows isn't really an option as it can only see one partition on a removable drive, so here goes with Linux.

The CF cards contain Windows Embedded XP in one partition and a separate partition for user data which isn't protected, not that the contents matter, only the fact that it is bootable with multiple partitions, the object is to upgrade the old 2gb cards to 4gb cards to add an additional program on the embedded drive, but they are both full.

as long as I can copy both partitions over the partition size doesn't matter as I can resize that if necessary, but I need both partitions to copy over to the new drive.

I have read that dd command is the way to go but cant find much on multiple partitions which display in Linux as two drives, so how do I go about this, any pointers

Ideally I would like to automate the process as this is something that we could end up doing on a regular basis, I have seen a USB drive that was plugged into a PC and through a basic GUI allowed you to copy a HDD but I don't know If that would do both partitions, something for the future?

Hello everyone,
Recently, I installed Linux Mint 17 (Cinnamon) on my HP dv6 Laptop. During installation Linux was not detecting my original Windows 7 and was attempting to occupy the entire hard disk. So I used the "Something Else" option to manually create separate partitions for Linux (Previously I had allocated around 120 GB free space for Linux using Windows Disk Management). This installed the Linux but after booting it does not detect Windows 7 and directly boots to Mint. I have tried installing and updating the grub but it did not help either.
Please Help...

I've made a couple attempts at installing these OS's on my machine and am still not getting it. I've actually been using AVLinux for about the past nine months, and it's working fairly well. And, yes, I know XP is down for the count, but for the moment it's the only MS option available to me - and I *need* to get it running for some work related web stuff...

This is all on a 32 bit AMD system btw.

What I've tried: Everything on one SATA drive. Partition one formatted to NTFS (about 20GB) for XP. Partitions 2 and 3 are Root and Home for AVLinux, Partition 4 at the end of the drive as the /swap for AVL.

All the how-to's and guides I've been able to come across point to (usually) Mint or Ubuntu's install dialog, and to select "something else" - which, by the way, is not a function of AVLinux's installation procedure. During install you can install GRUB to the MBR *or* root partition..

So, just to clarify to procedure (as I might have it now, but am very unsure) XP gets installed first (which is done at this point...) then my Linux distro *to the MBR* (?) then I need to add a stanza to GRUB telling it where XP lives? XP is not showing up on GRUB as I'm doing it, but I'm not too sure if installing Linux to the MBR (on the same physical drive as XP) actually wipes out the Windows bootloader....and if so, how chainloading would actually work...

So, any help appreciated, thanks.

Hi,

Before installing Linux Mint 17 to the entire HDD of my HP p2 1317cb desktop, it was running a preinstalled windows 8 OEM UEFI. After several failed attempts of dual booting(no grub menu and boots directly to the windows 8) i then decided to do a erase all and install Linux option. Now i have Linux Mint 17.1 working flawlessly, so far. What i want to now do is, dual boot a windows 7 installation alongside my Linux. Please advise on the best way to do this.
Thank You.

Note: Before doing a clean install of Linux i disabled secure boot,enabled legacy, and disabled fast boot.

I wish to do a fresh install of win 8 over the tech preview 10 which is on my dual boot system. On my partition win 10 is on the left and mint 17 is on the right. I'm afraid that even though I'll direct win 8 to install over win10 it will also wipe out my mint installation because of its position on the partition. Can someone confirm this?
thanks