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The "Linux questions (and other stuff)" thread

Can't get past the GRUB menu when booting from USB. Just a blank screen. From what I can figure out, this is a video driver issue. Tried editing the command line to insert the NOMODESET, but still the same.
 
I don't remember seeing a grub menu from a LiveUSB stick with Mint. Is this a newer laptop? You might be bumping heads with the UEFI bios. You might try booting in legacy mode.
 
I'm sure you are using an installation ISO, not a live CD ISO. You will not see a Grub menu with a live CD.

Go back to your distro's download page and make sure you download the correct ISO.
 
Yep, I used that. I think I've made progress. I reformatted my USB and made sure it's a FAT32 system. I then went to install the ISO onto it with that program, this time not maxxing out the persistent storage available. I left it alone and went out for dinner, came back and booted from it. Went through the menu and got an error over a missing file, but at least I had something better than a blank display. I then booted back into Windows, checked the drive, and it was indeed missing files. I realized at this point that my computer had crashed and rebooted sometime during the process while I was gone. Got it running again right now.
 
I got it running. Currently running Mint 17 from a USB drive and seeing how I like it. So far, so good.

I ended up editing the E:\boot\grub\grub.cfg file and adding the nomodeset line there. I also went into BIOS and disabled secure boot. I'm not sure which of those changes made it work.
 
OK. so question for if I decide to install later when I get home.

I noticed in the install menu it wanted me to unmount dev/sda. It seems to be the name for all the drives "sda/dev1, sda/dev2, etc). So if I unmount it, is it going to disconnect all of my drives? I am assuming this is the action I need to take, but I'm not 100%. The drive i'll be installing it on is my D: drive if you're running in Windows. It's just an empty drive that I've a few files saved to(mostly my Android SDK stuff).

My understanding is that i'll unmount, select that drive on the next menu, choose a partition size, and then let it do its magic. Is this correct? Trying to harken back to my days of installing Windows, although I know this is apples/oranges.
 
I'm guessing you at one point used the file manager in mint to browse your windows 8 drive just to see if you could see the files. That would have mounted it, so to install mint, you'll need to unmount it. Yeah, that's right.

The question is will you be installing a dual boot or you want to get rid of windows altogether? (and don't call me "Shirley" ;))

If the former, you'll need to shrink the windows volume to allow enough room for the linux partition and swap space. You'll be given the option to install either way, just make sure, if you want to keep the Windows partition, that you back it up ... or at least your data, in case something goes all cattywumpus.
 
I want a dual-boot. I'm not 100% committed yet, and there may well be things down the road that I need Windows for.

I had browsed the file manager and saw my primary Windows HD(C: as windows refers to it). Do I really need to shrink the partition though? Windows installed on C. I want to install Linux on D.
 
If you have a separate drive, then you don't have to shrink your Windows volume. If it is a physically different device, then unmounting /dev/sda (which my logic dictates is your Windows drive C: ) is a measure to protect that drive form accidental overwriting as you'll be installing your new OS on dev/sdb
 
If you already have a partition "D:", then sure, it'll just blow that one away and format it as an EXT4 volume. Personally, If that's the route your going, and you have nothing on D: right now, I'd blow away the D: partition first and let Mint build the new partitions as needed. D: is most likely NTFS and needs to go.

If I remember the install options with Mint you get either keep existing OS's and boot Mint along side, reformat everything and only use Mint, and, of course "advanced". If you want to use the space taken by an existing NTFS partition for the Mint install, i believe you'll need to go to advanced options and manually set up the partitions yourself, which is a pain.
 
/sda is your first HD (\C: in Windows speak). /sdb is the second HD (\D: in Windows). As Dngrsone said, unmounting /sda is to make sure that the Windows install on it is unmolested.

You can either dedicate the entire /sdb drive to Linux or partition it part Linux ext4 and part NTFS if you want to still have some of it available to Windows.
 
Crash, I'm thinking bjacks has a laptop with only one physical hard drive in it which would be /sda. If he's got a D: partition, C: would be /sda1 and d: would be sda2 (or 3 or 5), not /sdb which would be another device. Right now, my laptop has my NTFS Windows partition (C: ) as /sda1, sda2 is the extended partition and mint is installed on /sda5 (EXT4) with /sda6 being the swap space.
 
Just remember after you have installed , setup, updated and finished crossing the t's make an image so it will be that much easier to get back to incase something goes wrong later. Make sure to backup before you install.
 
Ok. I wasn't sure. I thought I had read that my particular model had 2 distinct physical drives, but I'll double check later and verify whether or not that's true.

So if D: is really just a partition of a single 1 TB HD, I would just click the advanced options and change the partitions.
 
bjacks12 said:
Ok. I wasn't sure. I thought I had read that my particular model had 2 distinct physical drives, but I'll double check later and verify whether or not that's true.

So if D: is really just a partition of a single 1 TB HD, I would just click the advanced options and change the partitions.
Click to expand...

It could be ... is it one of those models with a 20 or 30 GB SSD and a 500GB sata drive? That might get a little dicey, if I remember those setups put the OS on the SSD and some of the applications on the sata drive. In that case, if you get rid of D:, you could muck up the windows installations.

Any chance you could post a screen cap of your drive management console?

disk console.jpg
 
I'll grab that screenshot later. There's no SSD on this model. It was advertised as having 1 TB. It's starting to make sense that they really did mean a single 1 TB hard drive and not just the total of the storage.
 
honestly with external drives being so cheap I would recommend you get a cheap 500gig or so and just install Linux onto that. Installing Linux and grub onto the external drive and then just having the computer boot to that device would not touch your disk partitions you have existing now. If you are unware of using Linux Partition Managers you should make sure you have an entire backup of your current setup before starting. It is just so much easier to go with an external drive.

EDIT:
The other plus side to the external drive is that you can take your OS with you. So if you switch computers but still want your linux just plug the drive in direct to boot to it and wahla your OS awaits you on a foreign computer :)
 
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