Found this thread, someone seemed to have a similar problem. He/she recommends taking the hard drive out and trying to install linux from a CD/DVD. Have to give it a try.
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Found this thread, someone seemed to have a similar problem. He/she recommends taking the hard drive out and trying to install linux from a CD/DVD. Have to give it a try.
You have to either get a temporary boot menu ẃith a hotkey (different between computers), or change the boot order via a BIOS menu. See this link for more details:
Installation/FromUSBStick#Booting_the_Computer_from_USB
But it seems that you can boot from DVD. I suspect that there is a problem with the hard disk drive. If you can boot from USB, you can run the computer from there in a more advanced way than from the DVD, because you can save data in a USB drive. See this link,
Try Ubuntu (Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Xubuntu, ...) before installing it
If it works fairly well with a persistent live drive or installed system in a USB drive, you can consider getting a new hard disk drive (or an SSD) to plug into your computer.
I'll have to get back to this project a bit later. Thanks a lot for your advice.
Right... I feel prettttty stupid now. I'd just assumed that the external hard drive on which I had the first installation file was broken so I hadn't used that since but tried new usb sticks. Tonight I thought I'd plug it in just to see what would happen. It booted into the Lubuntu installer and I could run a disk check. That told me that there was one file with an error in it. I wiped the disk with my mac and made a new installation file from the original Lubuntu iso with Unetbootin. I plugged it in: no more errors and the installation worked like a charm. I now have a spanking new Lubuntu installation on my old laptop.
Thank you for your patience and advice and sorry for being such a clueless newbie.
Hi,
I had this exact same problem just 2 weeks ago installing lubuntu on an old laptop with an intel core 2 duo and 2GB RAM. What I think happened was half way through it crashed and failed to install the bootloader so it wasn't booting and just loaded to that black screen. I think the old bootloader is the first thing lubuntu took off my old laptop and the last thing it added when it finished installing. I crashed inbetween that so my laptop couldn't boot automatically. I'm pretty new to this stuff (1st year college student) so forgive me if I'm wrong or sound a bit dumb. What I done to fix it was restarted the machine and kept pressing esc to get into the boot screen, then manually booted from CD or USB and restarted the process. I had to select the "connect to network" setting for it to install. If i didn't select that, the same problem kept happening. It was lubuntu 16.10 that i installed.
Hope it helps anyway.
With the specs you have on that machine Ubuntu should run good I've seen machines with less do well also.
This tells me something when wrong when you tried burning that ISO file to your USB stickQuote:
I took the hard drive out (is that what you meant?). Without it the screen after the BIOS screen says "Operating system not found". The same with the live usb stick in.
What machine are you using to burn the ISO file to the USB?
Do you have a Windows machine that you're using if yes try using Rufus https://www.ubuntu.com/download/desk...ick-on-windows
Hi
Yes, it must have been something like that. I just thought it was weird that the laptop wouldn't boot with the new usb stick installer which I made. Only after I plugged in the original external hard disk with which I'd tried the crashed installation it booted to the Unetbootin Lubuntu installer. Even though I'd wiped that disk and created a new installer on it. Probably something to do with the crashed installation attempt. I have no idea what that would mean in technical terms.