I want to install linux Mint 13 on my computer. I got the cinnamon .iso for 32 bit and used unetbootin to make a live usb, but when I boot from it, the screen just says BOOT ERROR. What did I do wrong?

You don't give any details of your hardware. Are you certain, for example, that it supports booting from USB? It could need the BIOS settings changed to include USB in the boot sequence. If it's an older machine then this might not be an option. In this case you need PLOP (specifically plopKexec) http://http://www.plop.at/en/plopkexec.html. I have used plopKexec on a Cd extensively for installing Linux Mint flavours on older machines.

BTW - if your machine has limited graphics capability it might not be able to run Cinnamon. The MATE versions of Linux Mint are less hardware-demanding.

Best of luck!

I doubt it has anything to do with your BIOS not supporting USB booting - you would boot right into the HDD boot process. I ran into a similar situation on one lap-top because it did not support PAE, which the Linux distro I was trying required. But in that case, it informed me that it needed PAE support. I was able to boot it on my newer desktop. It could also be a bug in the distro. I have a lap-top on which I could never install, or run in live mode, Ubuntu 10.04 because of some change. I had no problem with 9.10, 10.10 and other Ubuntu versions, just 10.04. However, again, I was able to run live (and install) 10.04 on my desktop. I did hit "Escape" at the start of running the CD and saw where it was hanging - as I recall, I think it was the video driver (that lap-top had a NVidia card). BTW, this also happened with 10.04, 10.04.1, 10.04.2 and 10.04.3. Of course, there is always the possibility of a bad download. If you already redid the download and the problem persists, you might try burning it to a CD (or a DVD if it won't fit on a CD) and see if the CD loads. I just had another idea, if you can load GParted, you could check the USB stick to see if it was marked as "bootable". Another possibility may be the USB stick itself is actually unbootable and you can try another USB stick. I recently bought a 16GB USB stick at Wal-Mart for $10. I plan on installing one of the distros on it when I get some time. BTW, you might try "Universal USB Installer". You can get it from pendrivelinux.com.

Hello,

You need to pre-format the USB to Fat32 using Gparted and then use Unetbootin to burn the iso image.

Cinnamon is not an iso image. You can choose Ubuntu Classic, Mate or Cinnamon on the login.


Regards,



Allan

In the BIOS options for my computer, I put USB-ZIP ad the first boot option. I used the same usb stick on a newer computer and it worked, so is USB-ZIP not what I think it is?

Different manufacturers have different options. You haven't posted any information on your hardware. If you selected USB-Zip and had your usb in the slot on boot, then I would expect that it is not correct. You can either post the various boot options your have in your BIOS with the hardware information or try all of them one at a time?

USB-ZIP is for the now largely forgotten external ZIP drives, which use a special format. So, the USB stick needs to be specially formatted to be recognised as a ZIP drive - You really don't want to bother with that.

USB-HDD should work, I think. USB-FDD won't. If these options are not available, then plopKexec on a floppy drive or CD will do the trick.