I have a hp Compaq c500. The hd died with windows 7 on it. I installed a new hd and wanted to switch to Linux. I tried Mint from an 8gb flash drive. The start page opened and then went blank. Now my flash drive is trashed. Then tried Linux lite from a cd and I got these crazy nulti-colored vertical stripes and that is it.

Pretty much most distributions will boot off of USB media or a CD/DVD and give you an introduction where you can then choose to try and view their variation of Linux or go ahead and install it on your drive.

The first question is what happened when you first booted. Did you see the starting screen for Linux, a splash screen for that Linux distribution, followed by some options to let you choose which way to go? Or have you always seen these bad screen renditions? With Mint you did nothing? It showed the splash and went blank before ever giving you any options?

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Some information on the hardware on your computer would be helpful. How old is it, RAM, cpu, graphics card.

It's an HP/Compaq C500, pretty old system actually.

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After posting and reading what everyone wrote I thought the HD installation. So I reinstalled the HD and found that the caddy was not inserting the HD fully into the plug. Fully inserting appears to fix the problem. I am currently installing Linux Lite. Thanks to all!