Anyone been here before?
I'm trying to put LinuxMint17 onto my Dad's old Toshiba Satellite Pro L10 netbook. It's 10yrs old and hosted Win XP ok, albeit slowly. I've given it 1Gb new RAM to speed it up.
I've got bootable disks for Mint 16 (32bit MATE), Mint 17 (32bit Cinammon) and Mint 17 (32bit XFCE), all correctly downloaded, md5sum checked, used successfully to install into my deskie and all of which boot up and work in the Toshiba.
Snag is, none of them let installation proceed onto the HDD.
I've sussed that the WiFi driver was inactive - i'll sort that via NDISwrapper later - I overcame that by hardwiring via its ethernet card and can get Firefox to access the web OK. Network access seems OK too through the router/wired connection. I'm running on mains power.
I've tried the bootdisk GUI install icons, tried running the install command from Terminal, both with the same result. Whirry disk for a minuite or so, then nothing. The GUI mouse pointer stops its spinning and reverts to normal - no lock up, no BSD, no info. Likewise from Terminal, the prompt returns after about 2 mins with nil feedback.
I've tried pre-formatting the HDD with new host partitions (to ext4 and swap) but made no difference. The attempted installs never get as far as any welcome screen or gParted optioning. So were stalling at the first hurdle, whatever that may be - something is preventing access onto the HDD.
Any clues where to start looking? I'm a linux newbie so this is the first real trial. But i'm trying to set up a dual boot to Mint or XP.
The HDD is rather small, 40Gb, with ~22Gb available for Linux. Is that too small? Or, is the MBR boot space on the original drive too small to be expanded - dunno what it is (here from work) but is there a minimum size?
If all else fails, i'll re-set the Windows partition and revert to XP, but that's a bit defeatist... (XP still runs OK for now, shrunk into an 18Gb partition. But it won't last for long that small once the AVG antivirus stuff start updating again...)
