Multiple Attempts at Precise Installation Failed

[henry cow]

I maintain several computers, including 2 "older" desktops at work.

Since I have succumbed to the upgrade bug, I decided it was time to move up. At this point, I have tried to install 12.04 onto a laptop and 2 desktops, in both Ubuntu and Xubuntu flavors.

I used CDs that I burned from .iso files that I downloaded here a couple of days ago.

In every case, the installation appears to be 99% complete, then tells me that some sort of error occurs and that it wants to run some sort of diagnostic and report the error.

This runs for a while, and hangs.

After a couple of these failures, I even went so far as to allow one of the installers to format the the entire disk and delete my 3 partitions, since that it what it wanted to do.

The results were always the same.

These are not hopeless computers, although they are not up to the minute they do have entirely adequate resources to load and run. The 2 desktops were running Maverick just fine and have not been giving me any other problems.

Was there a bad .iso out there, should I download a new one?

[oldfred]

Did you check that ISO was correct? Did you burn at slowest speed?
And there still are some issues with some computers.

https://help.ubuntu.com/12.04/installation-guide/i386/index.html
https://help.ubuntu.com/12.04/installation-guide/i386/boot-troubleshooting.html

Also instructions for CD or USB
http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu/download
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BurningIsoHowto
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/FromUSBStick
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HowToMD5SUM

Can your computers boot from USB flash drives. I converted a while ago and find it installs faster. But some users with some brands also have issues with flash.

Biggest issue seems to be bad downloads.

I just burned a CD and installed without any issue on my system, just to see how CD works since I have use flash (and now another hard drive) to install since 10.04.