Black screen, non completion of install
 

Running a new HP Pav. g7-1237 dx notebook. When trying to install Linux Mint 12, install stops with a black screen and no further disk activity. At least thats how it manifests itself to the user. Waiting does no good. Just never finishes the install. Anybody have any suggestions? It a AMD Radeon chipset and dual core cpu. Also have win7 installed but trying to load a live cd from boot. Have also loaded Fedora 16 as live cd but sometimes this also shows same issues. Am not totaly a newbie but not much more than a casual user of Linux. Like it, but need wireless connections (driver issues) to do anything useful. Fed 16 does get past this problem. Thanks for any help.

This may be due to the correct drivers for your video card not being loaded. I would run the text-based installer and see if that works.

Cheers,

Josh

Can you boot the live CD into a "safe" graphics mode (ie, using the vesa driver instead of the graphics driver for your video card) and install from there?

HP Pavillion G7
 

I've had the same problem with Mint 12, Fedora 16, and Ubuntu 11.04 on my HP Pavillion G7 with an AMD 64-bit chipset. All have no video and I can't get to a text screen. Ubuntu 10.04 works except for wireless, and Parted Magic works perfectly.

With Fedora, edit the kernel line to delete rhgb and quiet and add a 3 on the end. This should boot you to the cli. It won't work in Ubuntu. Ubuntu's runlevel 3,4,and 5 are (or were, last time I tried it) no different from their default runlevel 2

could also add nomodeset to the grub linux/kernel line

Problem no longer an issue at this time.
 

Still have problem but installed on a vista machine with no issues. Apparently Win7 and the image file have a problem. Anyway, thanks all for your help. DWE

After I posted this, I installed 64-bit Debian Wheezy on this laptop. It's been working perfectly for the last 3 months.

Debian Wheezy broke video
 

Sad to say, after an update two days ago (5/27/12 - a total of two weeks worth of updates, including the kernel), the no-video issue cropped up again.

Problem solved - use Mint!
 

And replacing Debian Wheezy with Mint 13 fixed the problem. :D