My parents got a new PC and they handed their old HP one to me. I figured I could format the hard drive and put linux on there and make it into a neat retroarch station. But I've hit a snag on the installation part.

Since the cd-drive is broken I'm using a usb installer. I set the PC to boot from there and I get the grub menu. I select start Linux and it takes a while but eventually it puts me on a desktop environment where I need to click a cd icon to continue the install. This is where I'm having issues, it just crashes from the desktop back into the bios and eventually back to the grub menu regardless of what I clicked or did on the desktop.

I've asked around and did some googling and learned that the Linux environment is stored on the memory before being installed to the hard drive. So I've performed a memtest on it and I'm not quite sure how to interpret it, any advice is appreciated. http://imgur.com/0aGgXao

So my problem is that I can't complete the install because it crashes to bios possibly due to faulty memory. Any tips? Thanks.

I'm using the 64-bit Linux Mint Cinnamon.

Hardware specs - AMD A10-5700 APU w/ Radeon Graphics 3.4Ghz, 10GB 1600 Mhz dual channel DDR3 memory and 1TB Hitachi hard drive.

Hello and welcome to the forum

Please post any error messages in connection with this. Is this a UEFI based system and what is the model and model number? Are you using Mint 18? Also, you can trying using the "nomodeset" parameter at boot but I'm not sure that will help in this case.

The results show the memory is fine but multiple passes may be needed before any problems show up. I would run memtest at least ten passes, preferable overnight. You can view differing viewpoints on the subject here.

While that may be possible, it's too early to tell.

Regards...

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Thanks for the reply, I was beginning to think nobody would. I have no error messages. It just dumps me straight back into the grub menu. It's an older system so I don't think it's UEFI. Though I've tried booting Mint in both legacy and UEFI mode. Both do the same thing. It freezes on the temporary desktop environment then crashes back to grub. I am not using any parameters, though I've had others elsewhere suggest that but I don't think this is a video related bug since it displays what's happening fine. Then again I don't really know anything about Linux so I could be wrong with my definition of that parameter.

Hi...

Your first post was only around a couple hours ago, sometimes it might be a day or two before someone responds, if at all. Please keep in mind this is not paid "technical support" or a help desk, the folks here are fellow users who volunteer their own time when they are able and/or willing.

Hmm, without any error messages, this will be more difficult to diagnose. See if the instructions here will allow you to remove the splash screen and see the boot log (as Mint is booting.) You can try different boot parameters, as mentioned here or here. Also, see if this can be duplicated using other distributions of Linux, such as Ubuntu (or any of its derivatives.)

Please provide the other information I requested (computer model and model number and version of Mint) and run memtest for the time I suggested above and report the results.

If were able to choose "legacy" and "UEFI mode" on the system in question, then you have a UEFI based system.

Regards...

The PC is an HP Pavilion P7-1240 - http://h20564.www2.hp.com/hpsc/doc/p...r_na-c03353576

AMD A10-5700 3.4ghz
10GB DDR3 1600mhz Dual Channel
1TB Hitachi Hard Drive
System BIOS JAS_707.rom v7.07

I'm using the latest version of Mint, downloaded yesterday.

I know you said to perform the memtests a couple more times but I just went ahead with your other suggestions since the first came out alright and I've been working on this for 3 days now and my patience is running out. Removing quiet and splash did not help, it still freezes then crashes from the temporary desktop that's loaded onto the system memory.

However, from that first link I was finally able to figure out exactly how to set these boot parameters, and I used nomodeset which seemed to work. So the problem was my video device in the A10-5700. Now I need to figure out how to fix that. Drivers?

From the liveCD, open a terminal and post the results of this (use [code] tags so it's readable) - install inxi in need

10 GB of RAM ... you sure all modules are compatible and the configuration is valid for your motherboard?

No idea, I'm pretty much flying at this blind.

I'll get that for you once I figure out how to fix the fact that I need to use nomodeset. Or well I guess I should say I need to fix the fix I attempted, which was download AMD catalyst for linux. I have an r9 270x which I want to put in this PC as well but apparently Catalyst made my system go black screen except for a white underscore in the upper left. I downloaded the 2nd from top 64-bit Linux option https://support.amd.com/en-us/download/linux


https://askubuntu.com/questions/6208...vers-wont-boot

I found that but so far I haven't been able to get grub to come up, I've tried several times both smashing shift and just holding it down but to no avail. Right now I'm trying to start Linux in recovery mode. I hope it doesn't just crash because it doesn't have nomodeset.