How do I get started with a new hard drive ?
 

Complete newbie and want to do this myself. Purchased bare bones system. MSI B75MA-P45 motherboard, intel 2.70 Ghz processor, Corsair 8 gb Vengeance memory, Seagate 2 terrabyte SATA hardrive. Put hardware together and system Posts. Created a start up disk on a USB thumb drive from a freinds Ubuntu 8 system. Downloaded Ubuntu 12.04 from website and copied it onto thumb drive. Plugged it into my new system and it boots right up into terminal mode. Poked around and I can change directories and list contents. How do I install this operating system onto the new hard drive?

Did you download Ubuntu 12.04 to your Ubuntu 10.10 system?
How did you copy it to the thumb drive? If you used the dd command, it should have booted to a graphical desktop with an install icon.
Did you get Ubuntu 12.04 from the Ubuntu site?

Instead of copying what you downloaded, burn it to the thumbstick using a media burner type of software. Download the ISO file from Ubuntu and burn that image to your thumbstick or DVD. You also don't have to download and burn it from a Linux system, for instance if you have a Windows system you can download the ISO and then use CD burning software to burn that ISO to your thumbstick or a DVD.

Once you've done that, it will boot as intended by Ubuntu and give you the option to install Ubuntu onto the target machine.

Thank you for your help. Unfortunately, I could not find a way to install from the usb drive. I wound up buying a DVD/CD/SATA drive and was able to install from the burned ISO.I will probably want this cd drive to do other jobs anyways. I was just testing to see if I could do without one.Ubuntu 12.04 is fantastic. How does Microsoft stay in business?

Newbie too, with MSI B75MA-P45
 

Sorry dear Joe, I am not here to help you but waiting for help. I want to buy this motherboard (...*) but before I want to know if I can intall Linux (LinutMint 14 Nadia) beside W7 (my wife is not Linux).

Can you, or somebody else, give me an advice about this motherboard ?

Thanks,

Jacques

* They are selling it with an i5-3550 4x3.30Ghz and an ATI Radeon HD7950 3072Mo.

You can install Linux alongside Windows 7 as a dual boot. The installation procedure gives you that option, just make sure you pay attention to the options (defaults are typically fine) when you perform the installation. What they do is repartition your existing drive, to take up some of the unused space for the Linux installation, but do so in a non-destructive fashion. Further, they modify the boot sector to use GRUB instead of the Windows bootloader so that you now have a menu which gives you the option to choose what OS to boot. When you learn a bit more about it, you can configure that phase of your boot to be longer or shorter depending on your preference, and you can also set it up so that one OS would be the default is someone does nothing (strikes no keys) at boot. Otherwise you'll have the option to strike a key to choose one OS versus the other, or merely wait for the timer to expire where it will load the default choice.

As far as the mother board, there will be no problem running most distributions of Linux onto that.

Thanks rtmistler,

I am already on dual-boot xp 32 bits / LinuxMint Nadia 32 bits. But the difference is the UEFI (it was Bios).

- I will have first to shrink the volume via Windows 7′s partition manager and to give place for Nadia (64 bits like W7). I think this will be easy.

Now I will search for the following steps. If I have any problem I will come back (and to say hello! too)

Regards

Jacques

P.-S. I am looking to this now :

Asus m5a99x evo r2.0
FX-8350
ZOTAC GeForce GTX 660 2GB OC Dual Silencer