I have a 2012 Dell laptop with Windows 7 HP 64 bit and would like to install Mint as dual boot. I have made room for the install by creating some unallocated free space. I have also tried with turning this free space into partitions.

I get the choose language and keyboard layout screens along with the add 3rd party drivers screens, but then it skips the choose where to install screen and goes to the screen where you would choose the device to mount the install. Except that the field is totally blank.

I believe that this may be an issue with the PC using a RAID controller, but the solutions I have seen so far go beyond my comfort level. I have gotten error messages that the installer has crashed and also no root drive. But I had to click on buttons on the window to get these brief messages.

Thanks for any help

Hi Larry_dB,

Welcome to LinuxQuestions.

Could you run the following command from a command line prompt while running Mint in live mode :

... and provide the output here ? This will give us a look at your disks and partitions.

Thanks.

Is that a command prompt or a terminal window? Not familiar with how to do a screenshot in Linux, but sounds like the prt-scr key is involved. Next I need a way to save it on removable media so I can paste it into a reply here as I am doing all of my communicating via Windows 7 for now.

here is shot

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I also have 80 GB of unallocated space that I think is not showing up. It was created by shrinking OS partition.

Hi again Larry,

For some reason, your lsblk -f command isn't showing file system size and usage. Could you please run :

... and post results.

Thanks.

You are probably meaning "df -hT" Rickkkk.
I'd be guessing the isw RAID is confusing the installer. The unallocated space probably needs to be outside of the on-board (fake) RAID. No idea if/how that can be done.

what is the sda5 new-volume? Did you do something after shrinking the C: partition?

It looks as if Windows has gobbled up all the primary partitions. I know that that was the case with my Windows 7 machine.

Here's what I did, in case it helps: I created unallocated space, then created an extended partition from the unallocated space; I then installed Linux (it was, in fact, Mint) to the extended partition, creating the Linux partitions on the extended partition.

Windows demands to be installed to the first primary partition; Linux will install quite happily to an extended partition.

Looks to me like sda5 is where the freespace you thought you created is. If that's the missing 80GB, you should be able to get Mint to install there. It will probably need to be deleted, then 2 or more partitions created in its place, so that you can have separate swap and optionally separate /home filesystems.

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Already tried all of that. I had 3 logical partitions made up of the 80GB of unallocated space. These were all viewable in Windows explorer. I will run the parted - when I get some more time. As was mentioned, all of my ability to create extended partitions was used up. I had to use a 3rd party tool to create the logical ones. I switched it back to unallocated space when Linux would not install on those. I may remove the Dell utility to free up a slot for an extended pertition with the 80GB

As mentioned in a previous post by syg00, the following command will give similar results:

.... if parted isn't part of the Mint live ISO (this would be surprising) of if you prefer, you could run the above command instead. If you run parted, remember to specify the -l option :

... otherwise it will run in interactive mode, dropping into its own shell.

Cheers.

Here is the screenshot from the df -hT command, the parted one did not work. Also included is the screenshot of where the install gets stuck and a screenshot of the screen that I never see copied from an install tutorial.

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The df command shows only mounted partitions and none of the windows partitions are mounted so you see nothing.
The other images show nothing, not sure if that is due to RAID or some other setting. If the system was hibernated, that would be expected behavior but 7 doen't do that by default. Might be due to RAID as suggested above.

It works for millions every day and is a very basic command. I would be very surprised if it was not available on Mint. Did you preface the command with sudo and did you use a lower case Letter L in the command (L for LIST)?

I will try again later, I am a newbie to this so please bear with. I mistook the l (one) for an 1 (lower case), so that is probably why it failed. Would this then be the command: sudo parted -1