help installing linux mint 7

dangerousmouse

dangerousmouse

dangerousmouse

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i got a new hard drive the other day, so have a 120gig spare now.

fancied giving linux a whirl on this. im completely new to linux but mint seems to be a good one to start with?

i downloaded the disc image, made an installation cd etc. removed all hard drived except the one i want to install linux on. cd boots, get a progress bar which gets to 100% then the display just goes blank!

the pc is still running, just there is no display.

amd x2 6000, 120gig sata maxtor drive (i think this is set up in raid JBOD or something).

hopefully someone can help.
 
Last edited:
Hey, bit of a wooo for giving linux a razz! (Mint is a good starting place).

Any reason you single hard drive is in raid jbod?? That may cause some comfusions... (well iv ended up with strange pc based arguments).

Anyway the most important question is what graphics card are you running?? Also have you tried dropping to the terminal with a crtl+alt+backspace when its blank and not loading a desktop??

You may find you have to manually set it to load the vesa drivers (default videocard drivers), its pretty easy to do either way :)

Anyway give it another try and if it just goes blank after 100% give it a ctrl+alt+backspace and see if the os is still active
 
for some reason i had to set the single hard drives to jbod otherwise they werent getting recognised?!

i have
2x wd raptor 74gb in raid 0
1 x seagate 1.5tb jbod
1 maxtor 120gb jbod

if there is another way for the single hard drives to be recognised while using the raptors i am interested.

graphics card is a sapphire 4650
 
Ah that is a bit weird! I havnt got a clue either how to sort it out

And a little uh-oh of the ati card :( (the ati card thread sort of say's it all...) But it still should at least work and get to a desktop. Which release of mint are you using?
 
Humm that is a bit weird if you cant get to a desktop as im running the 32bit version on my laptop (ati card and all).

Right try booting it again, and let it load normally. When you get just a blank screen give it a ctrl+alt+backspace which will kill the X server and drop you to a command line. It might ask you to login as someone so try root (there shouldnt be a password, and i cant remember if it does it automatically).

At the command line type "nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf" to edit the the X config, and scroll down to a line called video card where you will have a driver option. Chances are you will have to set that to "vesa". Then press ctrl+x to save and exit and give the command "startx" ago. This should get you to a desktop to run the installer :)
 
Thats really weird! Yeah see what happens with the nvidia card (just in case) otherwise id recommend trying another distro, unbuntu seems to be popular.
 
pingwing said:
You may find you have to manually set it to load the vesa drivers (default videocard drivers), its pretty easy to do either way :)
Click to expand...

Installers have moved away from starting with fail-safe defaults? :p

If I were writing an installer, I'd start with 640x480. Is there any card /monitor out there that would choke on that resolution?

The first order of business would be to configure the resolution. By all means, attempt to auto-detect. But have a "Reverting in x seconds" fallback.

Showing a new user a blank screen is unacceptable.
 
I'd try changing the boot options... I used to have problems with Ubuntu 8.10 if I didn't add an extra command to the grub menu (acpi=off) and delete the splash keyword (which meant you could see the boot up process rather than getting the progress bar).
 
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