working around 12.04 install failure

[aaronbp]

So the install program is consistently failing. Tells me my hdd or disk drives are either broken or overheating. Maybe they are overheating, but they aren't broken.

I tried rsyncing / to a mounted /dev/sda1. It seemed to work, but when trying to boot from it I get stuck at


Verifying DMI Pool DataI don't have a backup system, so I can't exactly try re-burning the live-cd. I'm on an older PC and my motherboard doesn't support booting from USB. What I'd like to try to do is modify grub and boot from USB that way, hopefully to get this thing properly installed. That's within the realm of possibility, isn't it?

[aaronbp]

Thanks for the help, you guys. :P

For posterity, here's how I solved the problem. I ran grub-install on /dev/sda, and downloaded a utility called the plop bootloader.

Extract the bootloader, cd to the Linux directory, and copy the files to $sda1mount/boot.

type



> linux16 /boot/plpbt.bin
> boot


when grub runs. It'll load a menu that allows you to boot from USB, even if your motherboard doesn't support it. So I boot into Ubuntu that way, but even still the install failed. So I downloaded the mini.iso from the usb install and burned it to a cd (which I would not have been able to with a livecd because I only have one disk drive), and was able to install from there.