Hi all,
I dont know where else to go, and so I am asking for help here. I have mint 14 and fedora on dual boot in my laptop. The laptop is a dell XPS15, and has i7, 6GB ram, and 750GB HDD.

But now, due to academic requirements, I had to install win7 on my laptop.

when the win7 installer loaded, I selected an empty 50gb partition for it to set up but as soon as I chose install, the setup froze there, and upon restart, the laptop's existing OSes (mint, fedora) are now giving kernel panics at boot.

Here is a pic of the Mint Hang:
http://picpaste.com/IMG_20130807_195143-m3cJ83E1.jpg

Here is a pic of the Fedora Hang:
http://picpaste.com/IMG_20130807_194932-ciojDpJt.jpg

My top priority is the data that exists in 2 NTFS partitions(300GB each) which I need to recover.

Even booting from a USB Key (Mint) does not work. I am guessing that the HDD may be causing the problem.
What do I do? Please help!!

Check out this thread: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...rocess-215270/


It seems to me like something has a memory leak. Are you able to boot into run level one on Fedora or Mint?

Did you try running hardware diagnostics yet? Reboot your PC and press the F12 key when the Dell logo appears on the screen. Select "Diagnostics" and let it run accordingly. It'll alert you if anything is wrong with your hardware.

Post back here with the results and we'll see where to go from there. You'll want to rule out any hardware-related issues first before tackling the software side of things.

As a dell certified tech who actually worked on the gold support line for XPS systems I can tell you this will more than likely be a waste of your time, unless your system is really b0rked they don't usually come back with good results. This along with the ctrl+f5 system image function in the dell systems is basically just a way for support to CYA, run the hardware diags, when they pass tell the customer it is their fault and they need to re-image their system. Also, the extended memory tests can take a significant amount of time (5+ hours in some cases) so keep that in mind.


An out of memory kernel panic is not usually hardware related although I have seen it before. The symptoms are strange that you get an out of memory error on all OSes, did you verify taht your BIOS is reporting the correct amount of memory that is in your system?

For anyone that gets this error, I could finally fix it by installing Ubuntu 10.10 I had previously tried Windows 7,8, Ubuntu 14.04 and Boot-repair iso without luck.

I solved the problem by reading this report: answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubiquity/+question/219002

Good luck!