Hallo Larry,

also I can say "I'm Warren Buffett" but I'm not him

Never trust "It's said" try by yourself and try more than one, sometimes the herd does the wrong choice and this seems the case due to the fact that Mint is nothing other than Ubuntu with Glued a customized desktop environment.

In 2010 Shuttleworth thought he had become the new Jobs so started to project an Epic Fail Unity which, in his thought, should have become The GNU/Linux solely, and adopted by everyone, Interface.
He was wrong, time is a gentleman :-D

So some Ubuntu developer started to waste time, there were already KDE XFCE plus a bunch minor DE and there was still gnome 2 to make better, developing Cinammon. gluing it on top of Ubuntu and naming it Mint.
They did nothing other than a DE and they are doing nothing other than a DE, to do a complete OS is a lot different.
It seems that they have no experience at all in developing a complete system.

Why I suggested you PCLinuxOS?

Cause since 2003 they are developing an OS and don't waste time developing a DE they use KDE which resembles since decades Windows look 'n' feel.
Cause PCLinuxOS is a lot less resources hungry than distro which like duckies follow IBM and its buggy systemd i.e. to surf the net I've heard a bunch of people forced to disable systemd resolver service or system won't resolve names (rotfl).
Cause since they're start with the defunct Mandriva PCLinuxOS was the most newcomer friendly out there.
It's not yet perfect, i.e. Broadcom BCM43142 doesn't work out of the box but they supply the dkms-broadcom package, you can dowload it from their repositories and after you installed it also wireless works without hasless.

But don't listen to me, don't say "he said".
Only you can know if something fits your needs and you will discover this only trying more tha one distro.

Now you have luck, you can try live without touching the hard disk, when I started in mid 2002 you were forced to install to check.

You are always welcome, feel free to ask when in need.

Btw. to me it was clear it was a mistyping attached instead of detached that's why I suggested you to try with nonet even if I think it could not much.
It's clearly a bug in Mint installer which want absolutely the net it seems, also if, as it seems too, it's not able to connect to what it would connect.
That's why it freezes.

Let us know!

Thanks Walker for the reply. Not really sure what you mean by the "grub screen". I know grub is supposed to be the boot loader, but any screens go by quickly.

This PC is also configured with a 32GB SSD drive which as I know it, speeds up boot. Could be why I am having so much trouble.

I also have this 14" laptop display routed to a 21" monitor which causes some lag in the display with boot screens. The battery is also dead and I am running on an AC adapter. So right after the Dell logo, I get the battery failure prompt and have to hit F1. Not sure how I got to the BIOS which is F2, but I have been unable to get F9 and F12 to work as once I hit F1, it seems to late for any other F keys to work.

I also tried Ubuntu 18.04 yesterday and had the same issue as with Mint trying to install. I will look more into PCLinux. I tried the minimal version just to see if it would install and I am not really sure it would, it just got farther than any other and appeared like it would. I would still want to dual boot with Windows 7 until I perhaps did not feel like I needed it.

am also posting the error message from the screen that I get when the install freezes for Mint or Ubuntu and I click the "Change" button.

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Don't mind, you have to do nothing at boot.
It's not a net related issue.

Nothing of above matters.
My media center is a 14 years old IBM T41 with CMOS battery and laptop battery both over and it works anyway connected to a 32" BenQ monitor.
The only thing to avoid it asks you every time you turn it on to set bios date and time is to leave it connected 24/7 with power supply so bios datas last in memory.

You have been very helpful this time and now it's more than clear why Mint, so as Ubuntu, so as everything which like Mint is simply a remastered Ubuntu only with a different desktop enviroment won't never install not only on your PC but nowhere.

In my second to last post I said don't listen to me, this time and only for this time listen to me.
The screenshot speaks.
Your hard disk is perfect, also if from your try of PCLinuxOS I was already sure of this.
What sucks is Ubuntu installer called Ubiquity used also in Mint, and almost in every Ubuntu based distro, cause they do nothing other than change DE (Cinammon instead of Gnome 3) and remaster a plain vanilla Ubuntu.

The installer doesn't see the partition cause the python script responsible to analyze your disk and find space on disk suitable to install the system is buggy and until fixed no one will be able to install nothing which uses, I don't know which, the same Ubiquity (Ubuntu installer) release.

And that's also why I asked you to try with something out of Ubuntu and remasters, a truly independently developed distro.

The universe of GNU/Linux is wide, don't be frustrated, now you have understood why you have had trouble and how to avoid them, start to try lives and find one which you feel comfortable with.

Happy GNU/Linux!

Update 01/18/2020
I discovered it now LOL
Bug discovered in 2012 but not yet solved.
WoW!
Luckily GNU/Linux is not only Ubuntu and derivatives.

1 members found this post helpful.

At the mint boot screen hit tab key twice, at the end of the line add nodmraid to the end of line, enter.

Thanks for the reply, boot screens go ny pretty quickly. Have been unable to freeze them so I can add the nodmraid command.

I downloaded the midsized version of PCLinuxos and was rather surprised that it apparently did not have a browser. It seemed to me to be the same as the Darkstar version. I am sure that the distros I downlaoded are not the same.

I am using UNetbootin to extract the iso to the USB stick, should I be using something else?

It is at the screen that says auto boot in x minutes with the linux mint logo when you first boot the usb. Pressing tab the first time should give you a menu with the first entry "start linux mint" highlighted. With linux mint highlighted press tab again and enter nodmraid before the word quiet

Hallo Larry!

Which "mid-sized"?

There are three official version in the download page

No browser sounds a little weird.

Also in the non official community Openbox edition there's the browser.

Errata In Openbox community edition there's no browser, I've checked from live.
I apologize for the mistake.

You don't need unetbootin if you have more than one stick or a light distro which runs from ram.

You can simply boot the live system, launch as root gparted and create a new msdos partition table on the key (it's in italian but I've highlighted what to choose in the screenshot) and then, always as root, copy the iso on the stick issuing

/bin/dd if=(the place where the iso is stored) of=/dev/(the key on which to copy) bs=4M conv=sync status=progress

And you are done.

A real example from my machine
If it's more comfortable for you there's a vid on how to use dd to write your iso to an usb stick/sdcard

Anyway I'm always here to help if needed.

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