Newbie Needs Help Installing Ubuntu!!!!

[smokeyjoe3]

Hey All,
I am an extreme newbie to Linux. I had opensuse11 on my pc and something went wrong and it cleared off my bottom taskbar. So I downloaded ubuntu and burned as an image onto a cd. I tried running it from the cd and it would get one screen past the one with the progress bar and then freeze. So I thought maybe it would work better if i installed it. So about half-way through the install, it stops and says there was a problem and that maybe the disk was burned too fast or the drive was old or the lense needed to be cleaned.(i had just got my pc back from the repair guy with all new drives) So here I am with with a pc that is useless as it has erased my current OS and won't load the one I want. So I downloaded ubuntu on my son's pc and burned it at a slower rate(think it was 8 or 10) It installed fine but when I went to run it..I got 2 or 3 screens into the startup and it freezes!!!!!!!!! WHY???? I restarted numerous times and sometimes it would make it to the same screen and freeze..sometimes it would only make it to the blank tan screen. SOMEBODY PLEASE HELP MEEEE!!!! Please

[rdumas]

The same thing happened to me. What I did was reboot my computer with the discs I got from the manuf. Then loaded Ubuntu 8.10
so go back to windows the move onto Ubuntu.
The other thing could be where you got your copy from. Check before you download for the size of the file, and make sure you are getting the whole thing.
Good luck, you will love Ubuntu, it is worth the effort.

[blackened]

Sometimes getting media downloaded and burnt properly can cause major problems in installation.

Best method is to download via Bittorrent so that the data is checked as it is downloaded. If you choose to download via HTTP or FTP, then make sure you check the downloaded data against the MD5 sum.

As to burning the downloaded data, I always err on the side of caution and burn at the slowest speed my drive will do (2x-4x), then immediately boot the disk and check it for defects. I've found that burning any faster results in a 50-60% failure rate on install, but YMMV.

As an aside, you won't get very far in Linux if your solution to problems is to reinstall or distro-hop. Buckle down and search for answers.

[alejobar]

Something like that happened to me with two pc, one had problems with the hard drive and I change it and everything went ok, the second one was the RAM causing problems, I change the RAM and the installation was ok. So maybe one or the other is causing you the same problem.