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Thread: Issue installing Ubuntu 14.04 on my old laptop

  1. #1
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    Issue installing Ubuntu 14.04 on my old laptop

    Hi all, I'm new here. I've just tried to install Ubuntu Desktop 14.04 on my old laptop but with no success. The liveDVD works well, I've explored some features and functionalities if Ubuntu successfully and the laptop is also correctly connected to the Internet by WiFi connection. The problem is that when I launch the installation the system, after the step showing the partition of the HDD and clicking Continue, stop all activity (both on the HDD and the DVD drive, leds off) and seems to do nothing. I waited almost half an hour but nothing happened. At this point I can minimize the install window and interact with the system as normal so it is not freezed.
    My laptop is an Acer Travelmate 2420, 1GB RAM, 60GB HDD with, I suppose, two partitions in Windows XP Home SP3 (C and D), Phoenix Bios 1.02.
    Thanks in advance and regards.
    Gigi

    PS: same issue with Linux Mint 17 ...

  2. #2
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    Re: Issue installing Ubuntu 14.04 on my old laptop

    Welcome to the forum!

    A couple of questions. When you say:

    Quote Originally Posted by gigi3
    The problem is that when I launch the installation the system, after the step showing the partition of the HDD and clicking Continue, stop all activity (both on the HDD and the DVD drive, leds off) and seems to do nothing.
    Which of the choices offered have you selected? There will be something like install alongside Windows, use whole hard drive and "something else" - I can't remember the exact workding of the first two.

    Long shot this, but there might be a (fixable) problem with your hard drive partition table which is stopping the partitioner from working. The best way of seeing if this is so is the output of a terminal command. From the Ubuntu live desktop, ctrl-alt-t to open a terminal and then run this command:

    Code:
    sudo fdisk -l
    You can copy the output of the command by highlighting it with the mouse, right-click -> copy, and then pasting it into your post or into a text editor. Please enclose your output between [code] and [/code] tags to preserve formatting. Simply type out the code tags either end of your output or use the paperclip icon in the toolbar of the advanced message editor.
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  3. #3
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    Re: Issue installing Ubuntu 14.04 on my old laptop

    Thanks for the quick reply. I've choosed the 'install alongside windows XP ...' option because I want to keep Windows. Tonight I'll do the test you suggest, thanks.

  4. #4
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    Re: Issue installing Ubuntu 14.04 on my old laptop

    I've subscribed to this thread so I'll see when you post. A couple more thoughts for you.

    The fact that you are getting a usable live desktop suggests that the original ISO and the DVD are OK, but it might be worth doing integrity checks if you haven't already. Check the md5sum on the downloaded ISO:

    https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HowToMD5SUM

    A link to the Ubuntu ISO md5sums is on that page.

    And to check that the DVD was burnt OK, start booting it and as soon as you see the purple screen with two icons at the bottom of the page, a stick figure and a keyboard, tap the space bar to get the old-style text menu. About third on the list is a disc check. Run that. You can check the md5sum of the Mint ISO but you'll have to find the md5sum somewhere on the Mint website. I don't know whether you can do a disk check on the Mint DVD the same, but if you can I should imagine the initial screen is green rather than purple!

    The other thing is that if you are wanting to do a dual-boot with Windows, and you can't get the partitioning stage of the installer to co-operate, the other thing you could try is to set up your partitions with gparted from the live desktop first, and then select "something else" at the partitioning page of the installer. You can set up partitions in something else, but I much prefer to use gparted. You have more flexibility with both number and size of partitions than leaving the installer to set up a dual boot for you. If you need help with that, the information from fdisk will tell us all we need to know.
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  5. #5
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    Re: Issue installing Ubuntu 14.04 on my old laptop

    I've already tested the integrity of both the iso images (Ubuntu and Mint) but in Windows with this tool and before burning the DVDs. They was both ok. I'll do the DVD check with the old-style text menu at boot time as you suggest. Thanks again.

  6. #6
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    Re: Issue installing Ubuntu 14.04 on my old laptop

    Thanks for the quick reply. I've choosed the 'install alongside windows XP ...' option because I want to keep Windows
    The Something Else option will allow you to do that. The Install Alongside is pretty much an auto-install, the user doesn't have much input and it's 'hope for the best'. Using 'Something Else', would give you much more control over the installation but if you are totally unfamiliar with installing Ubuntu/Linux, you would need to read some tutorial before beginning or you could run into problems. The link below has an excellent, detailed tutorial as well as some background information on partitioning, etc. and would be useful to bookmark:

    http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/u...all-guide.html

  7. #7
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    Re: Issue installing Ubuntu 14.04 on my old laptop

    Hello, I'm back ...
    The `Check disc for defects` give me `no errors found` then the `sudo fdisk -l` give me the following:

    Code:
    Disk /dev/sda: 60.0 GB, 60011642880 bytes
    255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7296 cylinders, total 117210240 sectors
    Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
    Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
    I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
    Disk identifier: 0x34fe34fd
    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
    /dev/sda1              63     6554519     3277228+  12  Compaq diagnostics
    /dev/sda2   *     6554520    60597179    27021330    c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)
    /dev/sda3        60597180   117194174    28298497+   c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)
    In Windows I got C drive 25.7GB total, 12.3 available and D drive 26.9GB total, 10.3 available.
    Thanks yancek for the link to those fantastic tutorials, I've just started to read some of them.
    Now I'm not sure how to proceed in order to set up the partitions. My intention is to install Ubuntu in a dual boot system togheter with Windows XP, still leaving a little amount of the available disc space to Windows. But, at this time, I don't want to go too deeply ... I cannot wait to have a fresh new Linux system to try .
    Anyway, I look forward to your advice before proceed ...

  8. #8
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    Re: Issue installing Ubuntu 14.04 on my old laptop

    You have three partitions which take up the entire drive. I don't believe xp has any software to resize(shrink) partitions. You can use the GParted partition manager which is on the Ubuntu installation medium so boot that, when you get to the Desktop click on the Dash (the Ubuntu icon in the upper left) and type: gparted in the Search box, hit Enter. The link I posted has a section on using GParted which is very brief but there is a link in that section to a detailed tutorial on gparted. Review that to learn how to shrink a partition. GParted will show which drive is largest and which has the most data on it.
    Last edited by yancek; July 12th, 2014 at 12:06 AM.

  9. #9
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    Re: Issue installing Ubuntu 14.04 on my old laptop

    I have a similar speced laptop (Intel pentium M, 992 MB) and was thinking could Xubuntu be a suitable replacement if Ubuntu fails for this indiviual?
    "There is no failure, just ways that don't work" And when this is realized, people are much happier in life because if they stop trying, they fail as to give up. If people take this approach in life, they will never ever fail"

  10. #10
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    Re: Issue installing Ubuntu 14.04 on my old laptop

    Quote Originally Posted by gigi3 View Post
    `sudo fdisk -l` give me the following:

    Code:
    Disk /dev/sda: 60.0 GB, 60011642880 bytes
    255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7296 cylinders, total 117210240 sectors
    Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
    Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
    I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
    Disk identifier: 0x34fe34fd
    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
    /dev/sda1              63     6554519     3277228+  12  Compaq diagnostics
    /dev/sda2   *     6554520    60597179    27021330    c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)
    /dev/sda3        60597180   117194174    28298497+   c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)
    In Windows I got C drive 25.7GB total, 12.3 available and D drive 26.9GB total, 10.3 available.
    It's fairly easy to calculate the partition sizes from the output of fdisk, and this is what they come out with:

    sda1 - 3.13 GiB
    sda2 - 25.77 GiB
    sda3 - 26.99 GiB

    First comment - GiB = gibibytes and that is what Windows is showing you the sizes of C: and D: in. It's probably referring to gibibytes as GB, but that is strictly wrong. There's a lot of confusion, but GB should refer to gigabytes, 1 gigabyte = 1,000,000,000 bytes, and GiB to gibibytes, 1 Gibibyte = 1073741824 (1024 x 1024 x 1024) bytes. Some computer traditionalists get upset by the distinction and insist that a gigabyte is 1073741824 bytes. Well - whether or not they have a point, there is enough to confuse one in this. Your hard drive is 60GB (gigabytes) which is equivalent to the 55.89 GiB that the figures I give for sda1+sda2+sda3 come to.

    Clear as mud, isn't it?

    Anyway, the important thing is that sda2 is your C: drive and sda3 your D:, and you need to leave sda1 alone. By the way, we don't use the C:/D:/etc convention in Linux - it's a Microsoft weirdness, and a source of more confusion by referring to partitions as drives. In Linux land, a drive is your physical drive, whether hard drive, flash drive, etc. A partition is a partition, and a drive can have several partitions.

    What I would do in your situation is to copy the approx 16 GiB of data in the D: drive to backup media so that I could delete sda3 completely. You could shrink sda3 to the right so that there is space between sda2 and sda3, but that would take many hours, and it would be easier and quicker, and less prone to problems, to completely clear the space to the right of sda2, and reconstruct your partition layout afresh.

    I would then shrink sda2, using Gparted as yancek says, down to no less than 20 GiB. Windows needs room to breathe, and it is currently occupying about 13-14 GiB of that partition according to the figures you give. Windows XP has no inbuilt tool to resize its C: partition so you have to use Gparted.

    So, say sda2 is now about 20GiB, and with sda1 occupying 3 GiB, you would have about 32-33 GiB of contiguous unallocated space to create partitions for Ubuntu and a data partition. I would suggest the following, and these are only my suggestions - there are other ways to proceed:

    Use Gparted to create an extended partition - you need this - you need at least three more partitions and your limit for primaries is 4. Your extended partition will probably be sda3. You then create logical partitions in this (Linux can boot from logical partitions, unlike Windows which can't) which will be numbered from 5. I would suggest this:

    swap partition - 1GB to match your RAM.

    ext4 - to be your Ubuntu root partition. If you want to store 16 GiB in the next partition, you have little breathing space. 15 GiB for this partition would be ideal, but I think you would need to go for 10 GiB. A fresh install of Ubuntu takes up a little less than 4 GiB (if I remember correctly) and it doesn't suffer from the bloat that Windows collects to itself, but you would need to store little if any personal data in your home folder to leave room to install applications. And then...

    ntfs - the remaining space, about 20-22 GiB if you make your ext4 partition 10 GiB. Store all your personal data on this. Ubuntu can read/write ntfs so a shared ntfs data partition is a good idea with a Windows/Ubuntu dual-boot.

    That leaves how to use the "something else" option - if you need help, post back. You have a few things to think about!
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