Ubuntu 12.10 dual boot installation hangs by opening disk partitioner

[tonycabo]

Greetings to the whole Ubuntu Forums community.

First of all,

Thank you.

;D

I'm an absolute beginner as an active user of the amazing tools that the open source movement has been creating. The spirit and motivations that sustain the will of all the people involved in these initiatives is one of those things that reinforces one's faith in humanity. :O

So, I've got a low spec machine that I need to prepare for creative purposes. Details:

• Lenovo 3000 N100 laptop
• Intel Celeron M CPU 420 @ 1.60 GHz
• 504 Mb RAM
• 90 Gb hard drive with 40 Gb of free space
• Windows XP installed

The target is to achieve the best performance possible with audio software like Pure Data or Ardour, powerful document creating tools like LaTeX based text applications or Lilypond, and other programs like GIMP. I'm well-informed about the poor specs of my machine for some of these applications, but there's not money to get better hardware and my only choice is to adapt. However, I dream with expanding my RAM to 2 Gb some day in the future.

I chose the Lubuntu 12.10 distribution, downloaded the Wibu installer and tested it. After applying solutions to small common issues (drivers, Broadcom wireless...) that I could fix with the resources of this forum and other sites, everything was working smooth and perfectly. I also tested the applications I'm planning to use frequently and they did very well. So I wanted to go further and make a dual boot installation alongside Windows XP, having uninstalled Wubi first. I first tried the Lubuntu Installer, which was just too big for my RAM and hanged at the beginning of the installation. Despite of that, I can run Lubuntu from the Live CD without problems.

After that, I tried the Lubuntu Alternate Installer unsuccessfully and also tried it through Ubuntu Minimal Installer having exactly the same problem: Right after getting the message "Starting up partitioner" nothing happens. The screen remains empty, showing just the background colour and a white bar at the bottom. At this point, if I hit the Enter key additional white bars appear. When hitting Esc the ]^ symbols are written in the blank lines of the screen. I also can type regular text in the blank lines. I always exit from this stuck point with Ctrl+Alt+Del.

All the .iso installers were mounted in CD-R disks and tested before burning the CD with MD5sum, and after with the checker that comes in the CD. I didn't have any errors at both of the processes.

Since the thing seems to be related with disk partitions I booted Windows XP and made disc scan with CHKDSK, defragmented the drive with Diskeeper and ran CClean. I also made a backup of the important files. After, I downloaded GParted and mounted it on a CD and booted to start the application from the Live CD. Following tutorials, I resized Windows XP's partition to 43 Gb, Created an ext4 partition for Lubuntu's root folder (40 Gb) and also created a swap-linux partition (4 Gb). I booted Windows XP twice, making another CHKDSK. Windows XP seems to have adapted perfectly to it's reduced hard drive space. After the whole thing I retried the three installation CDs mentioned above and got stuck exactly at the same point.

Finally, after searching in this forum and other sites for solutions to this thing without success I created this thread looking for hope. I really tried to do my best after posting, but i really can't get over the thing and it is quite frustrating. Sorry for relating the whole Installing Lubuntu chapter of my life in such a long post. I just thought it could be useful explaining the process of what I tried. D:

So, please, beloved experts: What's going on here? ;D