Installation of 12.10 from liveCD onto clean HDD

[Ionedric]

Hello to all- This is my first post, and in hopes of avoiding public humiliation, have spent two days researching similar problems with no success.

I am attempting to install 12.10 from a livecd download. The computer is an HP a320n which had been running Win XP until a HDD crash. I pulled and re-formatted an old drive which had Win 95 installed. When the 12.10 CD is installed, the drive activity light goes on, the drive does a track search, and after about 30 sec of searching, gives an error message saying that the CD is not bootable and that I should install a bootable source and try again.

The 12.10 CD is a good download since I can install it on another computer running Win XP with no problem. Everything works as expected.
The target computer is good since it will recognise a bootable (old Win ) CD, and would proceed with installation if allowed.

Computer - HP a320n
Proc - Pentium 4 2.8 Ghz single core.
Mem - 1.5 Gb

The main chunk of information I'm looking for is whether this should work. Is the download expected to work on a non-Win machine or does it look for a previous installation?

Hoping for a stupidly simple answer....

[grahammechanical]

We call it a live session. When the machine boots it will look for an operating system. The machine does not care what the operating system is. What the machine needs is direction on where to look first for an OS and then second and then third. You seem to have set this up correctly. Have you considered the possibility that the CD drive is faulty? Or that the lens in it needs cleaning?

You have tested the Ubuntu image on the CD. It works in another computer but not on this computer. Why? Because the image on the CD is faulty? No. Because the boot priority is set incorrectly? No. What about the CD drive itself? I have installed Ubuntu on a blank hard disk. The live session/installer is designed to detect other operating system on the target hard disk but it can still install Ubuntu even if the hard disk is blank and unformatted. Take my word for it. I have done it.

Regards.

[omid2s]

hello dear Ionedric
you have check some problem.
first: your HDD havent problem.with a program / such as HDD life.
you had make free space one of your drive for install ubuntu12.10.
live cd havent problem if you download it from ubuntu site.
if your speed of internet is low //the iso file maybe have problem

[ibjsb4]

You do seem to have an odd problem.

One thing I notice is you tested your drive with a CD and it worked fine. But 12.10 comes on a DVD. So me wonders if this is a DVD problem with your drive.

A workaround to this would be to install 12.04, it will fit on a CD. 12.04 is an LTS (long term support) and good till 2017.

Also I notice that your processor (AMD Athlon XP 2800+) is a 32bit processor. You did download the 32bit version and not the 64, right?

[Ionedric]

Firstly, thanks to all for the quick response! I do have a DVD with 12.10 rather than a CD, sorry. I believe I downloaded the 32bit version, I may download it again just to check for any problems.

There seems to be nothing wrong with the CD drive as it works fine to read a Win disk. I don't have anything bootable on DVD so can't swear that the drive would boot, but it was working fine earlier.

As a further test, I downloaded lubuntu and created a CD which also fails to boot in this machine. I can change the order of device selection in the BIOS and still get the same results with all devices showing activity before the "boot failure" message appears.

Any more ideas would be welcomed, I'll go back over the download process just to be sure. Regards,

[ibjsb4]

Yep, think I found it. Or should I say not found it I have not been able to confirm anywhere that your processor can run a PAE kernel. All ubuntu distros these days run the PAE kernel. So I am thinking that the other computer used for testing your DVD/CD is PAE capable. If you want to confirm this you could try to install "Ubuntu Lucid 10.04". That version uses a non-pae kernel.

http://releases.ubuntu.com/lucid/

If that works, you should be able to upgrade to 12.04. But I have not tried that so really not sure if it will work. Need someone else to confirm that.

[fiodev]

use ubuntu minimal and you can choose a non-pae kernel and lots of other cool things

[ibjsb4]

@fiodev

How do you get the non-pae install on the mini iso?

[Ionedric]

OK, lots of stuff to try! Have found a stack of old Win XP recovery CDs and have tested the machine by restoring XP (both the CD & DVD drives work fine. When that's done I'll see if 12.10 will install. Meanwhile I'll look into the PAE related aspect. Tried to download 12.04 but never get beyond 128Mb before the download terminates with no explanation. Appreciate all the help......

[Ionedric]

It seems that all Pentium processors after II should support PAE so that seems to be a non-issue. After spending 3 hours inserting CDs to do a system restore, the final result is that the machine will not boot from the HDD. Something really strange here. May try to find another HDD to try although the fact that the machine sees the liveCD as a non-bootable source is the real mystery. May have to give up for now,can only stand so much fun.......