Linux mint 15 wont boot (live CD)

[Red Squirrel]

I want to install Linux mint 16 64 bit, but it wont boot, it just goes straight to a flashing black screen, it goes from a very dark black to a slightly lighter black, and flashes once per second, the only thing I see is a blinking cursor like in dos.

Anything I can check? I have installed mint 15 on this same computer before but I really want the most up to date version if there's a way to make this work.

From what I googled a lot of people have this issue but I have yet to find a fix. I think it's related to UEFI. Most new motherboards have it now so not like I have much choice either.

I also just switched out my video card and I now have a R7880. My CPU is a Core i7 and motherboard is a X79-UD3.

I've been having nothing but problems with my system and trying to rule out the nvidia driver so I want to use ATI.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Ended up going with Fedora Core 19, did not realize it let me pick the desktop environment, so I'm not stuck with the UI that is like Metro.

Only thing that is kinda a bummer is login time is rather slow. Good 5 minutes before the desktop shows up after I login. Was about to hit the reset button thinking it did not work. But hopefully now that I removed lot of variables (new video card and new OS) my problems will go away so I wont be rebooting 5-10 times a day.

 

[ControlD]

This might be too late, but I also had problems getting the Mint 15 CD to boot when I recently built a new Haswell system. The solution for me was pretty simple, I just had to go to my boot menu option when the PC was posting (F12 on Gigabyte boards) and select UEFI DVD boot rather than the standard DVD boot option.

Getting Mint 15 to actually install on a UEFI system is a different (and poorly documented) problem.

 

[mmntech]

Mint 15 has some weird booting issues. Had some issues installing it to an SSD I had where it refused to boot (from the SSD, not the Live USB). Had to use Boot-Repair to get it working but it was fine after that.

 

[ControlD]

Mint 15 has some weird booting issues. Had some issues installing it to an SSD I had where it refused to boot (from the SSD, not the Live USB). Had to use Boot-Repair to get it working but it was fine after that.

Was this on a UEFI system? I had to manually add a /uefi partition to my disk prior to installing and then it worked. I never tried the Boot-Repair function, maybe that would have worked as well.

I must really be slipping, I didn't even know Mint 16 was out. Or maybe that's a beta release?

 

[Red Squirrel]

Hmm good to know. I might give it a try, but I might also stick with Fedora. I use Fedora/CentOS for all my servers so it kind of makes sense to try to stick to one platform. Though, I will miss the speed of xubuntu. Fedora is bloody slow at loading. Like, slower than Windows.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Got around to trying it just for fun but it just drops me to a grub command line.

I'll have to live with Fedora, it's just sooooooo slooooooooow.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Could not stand Fedora. UI was kind of flaky and the themes were not even applying to anything but the start menu, and the default theme kinda sucked... too white. And often the top bar of any window would not fully render and duplicate part of the window. It was also BLOODY SLOW. Everything was slow, click on something, wait, boot up, wait, everything was about waiting.

So decided to bite the bullet and go with standard Ubuntu and try to put up with the "Metro" style of doing things.

Now I'm trying to figure out how to even reboot this thing, or open a console window. Gah! Why did Linux, of all OSes, decide to pull off this metro stuff? I want to stick with something as standard as possible though, when I pick stuff like XFCE, Cinemon, Mate etc... the issue is when I google stuff, everything I find does not apply. Files I'm directed to edit don't exist, etc. It makes troubleshooting stuff too hard. But I don't know if I'll be able to stand not having a start menu.

TBH, I'm even contemplating going back to windows 7. It just works. I just hate having to fight to do simple tasks. On the other hand Windows has it's own set of problems, and I do like the automation Linux offers, and how things unify better with my servers.

I even tried to restore the image of my old system and just call it a day and stick with that, but it's broken now. Wont boot into the GUI, though it did that before. After several reboots it would sometimes work. I think it has to do with the nvidia driver still being in the system and the fact that I switched to ATI. Some kind of conflict there. So best to have a fresh install.

 

[Apathetic]

This might be too late, but I also had problems getting the Mint 15 CD to boot when I recently built a new Haswell system. The solution for me was pretty simple, I just had to go to my boot menu option when the PC was posting (F12 on Gigabyte boards) and select UEFI DVD boot rather than the standard DVD boot option.

Getting Mint 15 to actually install on a UEFI system is a different (and poorly documented) problem.

Since you mentioned Gigabyte boards... I recently installed Mint 15 onto a Gigabyte board and had to make a couple of BIOS changes for it to work:

1) I turned off UEFI mode (I think the BIOS refers to this as "Legacy"). Otherwise I could run the Live CD just fine and even install without any problems, but once I rebooted, it wouldn't see the OS on the drive. No big deal.

2) The big problem I had was getting it to talk on the network. The card was being listed correctly under LSPCI, and was showing all the symptoms of a driver issue (there's a LOT of threads on the web about Realtek r1869/r8111 driver issues). None of their solutions worked for me. To make a long story short, I had to toggle to default IOMMU setting in the BIOS for things to work. Once I did, it just worked. I didn't have to rebuild or blacklist any drivers, etc.

My motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-970A-UD3 AM3+

Dave

 

[Red Squirrel]

Hmm I have a Gigabyte board too, probably where all my issues come from then. I did not know about being able to go back to legacy mode though, I will have to see if mine has that option, it would make my bootup much faster. More than 50% of the bootup time is before the OS even starts to load.

I ended up going with Kubuntu though, and happy with that. I was starting to get a little discouraged though since I was having so many issues trying to get most distros to work properly.

 

[ControlD]

Hmm I have a Gigabyte board too, probably where all my issues come from then. I did not know about being able to go back to legacy mode though, I will have to see if mine has that option, it would make my bootup much faster. More than 50% of the bootup time is before the OS even starts to load.

I ended up going with Kubuntu though, and happy with that. I was starting to get a little discouraged though since I was having so many issues trying to get most distros to work properly.

I think it probably has more to do with UEFI than Gigabyte boards in general probably. You can always switch back to legacy boot assuming you aren't dual booting Windows 8 for example (which I am). I would guess that the next version of Mint will better support installation on newer boards. It's a little disappointing honestly that this problem hasn't been addressed already.