I want to change my operating system from linpus to Mint 11 lxde.

I have downloaded linux mint. It's about 700 MB.

I opened unetbootin in root, the device name showed, I clicked on the image bullet, entered:

/home/user/Downloads/linuxmint-11-lxde-cd-32bit.iso

into the ISO window

clicked ok.

It started to copy the file, then after a couple of seconds it stopped and asked if I wanted to reboot or quit.

I then checked the stick and it was virtually empty still. There were five small files in it:

ldlinux.sys
menu.c32
syslinux.cfg
ubnfile1.txt
ubnpathl.txt

Before I knew the stick was virtually empty I tried to reboot with it and it said "missing operating system" and booted with linpus as usual.

Is it possible unetbootin-linux-555 is not the version of unetbootin I need? They say unetbootin is not distribution-specific, though.

Can anyone suggest what I might try next?

It should take a lot longer than a few seconds. Are you sure the ISO is not damaged? Do an md5 on it and ensure it is not corrupt.

The md5 checks out ok.

Unetbootin on Linux can be problematic. Try running it again and see if it works. The USB drive should be formatted as FAT, not a Linux filesystem.

Could you please give some instructions on formatting the drive as FAT?

Where sdXY is the partition you want to format.

OK, now what should I put in the ISO window within unetbootin? The mint file is called linuxmint-11-lxde-cd-32bit.iso and it is located in the Downloads directory.

Yes, you can put that, or click on the button on the right and navigate to the .iso file, to make sure you get the right file.

1 members found this post helpful.

I think you need to install p7zip for unetbootin to work properly have you done that ?

No, I haven't done that. What's the code?

By the way, The last time I tried this it ran for a real long time and put everything onto my hard drive somewhere, so I need to delete what I copyied now and I don't know how to do that.

You can search for big directories like this:

du -s * | sort -n

Start in your home directory, see which directories have a lot of space used up. Then you can cd to that directory, and run the command again, and keep following the biggest directories until you find it.

If you were running as root, you may need to do this whole procedure from the root directory (/) and go from there.

Here is the bulk of the run:

0 libssl3.so
4 Music
8 mozilla.pdf
12 Desktop
3916 DataCardGKU
9940 firefox-3.6.tar.bz2
27740 Documents
48348 Pictures
565080 Videos
879324 Downloads
[user@localhost ~]$

Everything here is accounted for. Maybe I do need to run the sort in root. How would I do that? Put sudo in front of the code you gave me? Or is it something with the slash you indicated? I'm showing my ignorance here, sorry.

Can you give me that code?

Thanks.

A lot of stuff on your computer is readable by you, so you don't really need to be root to do this. If there is a directory where you don't have read or execute permissions, and all the big files you lost are down there, then you would need to be root.

So you could use sudo or su to become root, depending on which way you like to get root:
sudo su -
or
su -

Then change to the root directory, and start checking to see which directories look "too big". Of course this is tricky, because there are lots of directories that are big and should be big. But you will find it eventually if you keep trying:

cd /
du -s * | sort -n

You're better off not being root if you don't need to be, but there's no way for me to know if you will need to be root to find those files, sorry. You will see some errors if you aren't root, because you can't read some files or directories. But that might not matter. So try it as a normal user first, if it doesn't work, become root, and try again.

I haven't used linpus. A little bit of searching indicates that it uses "yum" to install software. So this might work:

sudo su -
yum update
yum install p7zip

You need to enter your password to get sudo to let you become root. Hopefully sudo is set up to let you do that.

Here's some more stuff about yum: http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=25880