I'm desperately trying to install Point onto an Acer Aspire Z5610 all-in-one and am failing miserably. I will say the issue is related to the Acer as I have the same or similar errors with nearly all the distros I have tried to install or run from a USB/DVD on this machine. The only one that has so far kind of installed is OpenSuse but even that is flaky. Plus I really want to install Point as I'm giving this machine to an elderly neighbour and I want to keep it as simple as possible for them and Point ticks all the boxes.

The Acer has a 1tb disk, 4gb memory and Intel 2.93GHz Duo with a touch screen. I've ensured the bios is up-to-date and tried installing after each update.

When booting I've used both USB and DVD either running as live or trying to install and I get the following:

Not enough memory to load specified image

I've then changed the boot options by adding mem=<N>MB (I've tried many, many permutations) and then get usually one or the other of the following.

[ 1.315304] Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block (2.0)

[ 0.468137] Kernel panic - not syncing: No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel. See Linux Documentation/init.txt for guidance.

As you may gather, I'm not a Linux expert although I have installed versions on many different machines, from desktops to netbooks, for people and this is the first time I've hit a brick wall. Acer, like all manufacturers, say that as it's not the OS it shipped with they cannot help. I've even tried Linpus, which is Acers preferred distro but I get the same problems.

I have spent a lot of time searching for a solution but either I've failed to see it (I am getting on, y'know) or the suggestions I have found don't resolve the problem.

If anyone would kindly point me in the right direction to resolve this I would be eternally grateful.

P

I usually suggest AntiX or MX, (MX being an easier distro for a beginner).
http://antix.mepis.com/index.php?title=Main_Page

(Please post your dmesg output here.)

a 1 TB drive on a 32 bit computer is a bit odd

did you replace the 320 Gig drive

and what format is this 1 Tb drive?
is it using a dos table or a GPT table
is it ext3 or 4 or btfs

Thank you very much for your recommendation. I've downloaded and installed with no issue.

I will confess that I wouldn't have installed this distro as I wasn't aware of it and, as you know, there are so many. Now I just have to test and configure to make it ultra simple for the people I'm donating it to.

I'm still a little nonplussed as to why the other packages (Point, Ubuntu, Pinguy, Mint, Elementary, Bodhi and many others) all gave me those error messages and failed even to Live start. A wee bit annoying.

But thank you once again, much appreciated.

P

The original drive in this machine was 1tb and partitioned into 2 500mb and running Windows 7, therefore NTFS. When I managed to get OpenSuse running (badly) I partitioned into 2gb swap, 40gb btfs and the remainder as XFS.

P

are you sure you mean 1TB, meaning one thousand gigabytes? originally on a 6-year old machine? i don't believe it.

you should probably repartition the drive to something more straightforward (ext4), and if it still doesn't work, try to put in a smaller hd. maybe the combination old cpu & giant hard drive just doesn't work.

It is, honest. It's a Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.B 1 TB (HDT721010SLA360), first manufactured in 2007.

As you may have noticed in my previous post, I've managed to install MX-14 without an issue but I'd really like to know why other distros I've mentioned had the same failure messages.

P

fwiw, i once tried to install some linux or other with xfs filesystem because some automated script gave that as a recommendation - but the install failed.

MX installed fine with XFS but I have noted various comments in regards to ext4.

As I said in my original post the issue is with many other distros in that if I choose to run live from a USB/DVD or choose to install from a USB/DVD I immediately get the "Not enough memory to load specified image" message. This is the problem I'm trying to overcome.

But thank you for your response.

P

this doesn't seem to have anything to do with the file system.

have you tried first partitioning with ext4 (de-facto standard nowadays), and then reinstalling?

btw, i think on linux swap is usually 1:1 with physical memory, so that would be 4GB in your case.

Installers are usually wrote by the developer team members and so are personal to that distro.

No two, unless they are spinoffs, are the same.
You are better off looking for answers from the distro you get that message in.

Lastly, are you md5sum checking downloaded isos before attempting to install on bootable media
and running the installer?

Thank you for that. I will say that my thinking was that the problem was specific to the hardware but there's no harm in posting this to distro specific forums. I just get frustrated with myself in having to take up peoples time with my questions.

And, yes, I always integrity check ISOs.

P