I tried to install Mint 9 (pretty much equivalent to 10.04 as far as I know) on my parents old HP PC running Windows XP SP3. I was quite surprised when the boot CD, which I used successfully at home on a more modern computer (aluminum iMac 7,1) failed to boot. I had hoped to at least be able to show them the interface before trying a real install.
The error message was quite cryptic:
Initramfs
Unable to find a medium containing a live file system.
I was able to get a list of commands after that but the few I tried to use to bypass the issue - continue, etc. did nothing. I tried to boot a second time using 'compatibility mode' and the result was the same. A memory test did not turn up any problems.
My parents computer is a few years old but it runs XP alright. The main HD has about 30 GBs free and the video card is from an Nvidia Geoforce. I think it has 128 MB of video memory. Of course I can find out more if need be.
Any advice on how to proceed would be welcome. I've got no idea how to troubleshoot this one. My own install went flawlessly and I hear about Ubuntu being great on older hardware (less demanding).
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