Hi everyone i have recently purchased mint cinnamon 16 on disc to install over windows XP 32 bit.
this disc fails to install at every attempt.
it partly tries to install in compatabillity mode but that fails also.
being a newbie I am guessing it's a boot manager
problem but maybe it could be something else.

Welcome to the forums!

First, why did you purchase mint? It is a 100% free download from http://linuxmint.com (hope you didn't pay very much!) and if you got the disc from some third-party source, how do you know it is good/reputable? Have you checked the md5sum for example?

Second, did you test-drive Mint in "live" mode first? This is necessary to evaluate how Mint will run on your hardware. If it doesn't run well in "live" mode, then you don't have to waste your time installing it.

Third, what are the hardware specs of your computer? (CPU, RAM, hard drive, video card, network adapter, etc.) Have you read the release notes and checked that your computer meets the minimum hardware requirements for Mint? (Most computers that came with XP originally are now obsolete hardware.)

http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2489

If you have a very old computer then you'll probably need a "lightweight" distro such as AntiX, or just recycle it and upgrade your hardware to something post-2010.

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