hi there,
my winxp media centre just ground to a halt, and spyware, anti-virus programs are no longer fixing things.
Time to install linux.
Ubuntu installed so smoothly on the last pc I installed it onto, that this time, I thought I'd have an attempt straight away without researching the hardware.

I put my ubuntu disk in, twiddled with the bios to get it to boot from the disk, and things were going fine, until the screen went red:



error returned when trying to install initrd-tools
Check /var/log/messages or virtual console 5

can anyone give me a clue as to whats going on here.
The failed install step was the base system, although it came after a tone of other things.

Any help with this would be greatly appreciated, this is my main computer, and this install should make me m$ free.

Additonally, whilst I'm asking, can you tell me if I'm even doing the right thing? Will installing ubuntu over the top this way kill whatever rootkit or other horrible code was killing the old os? I'd downloaded the recent temporary patch and tried all kinds of thing to clean it - does ubuntu totally clean house?

am i being a total pillock for not researching the hardware first?
thanks again for any replies!

howard

Did you do this? What was the error?

Yes. If you are able to get to the point of actually installing it, one of the steps is to reformat your hard drive, and create new filesystems. This will effectively destroy any data that exists on the disk.

Even if it didn't, windows viruses and malware has no effect on a Linux system anyway.

hi
i have no way of knowing the error. I don't know how to get to the file location at all, if the ubuntu hasn't finished installing.
In fact i don't know anything more than I've already written in the first post.
One thing i considered was maybe it was the graphics card getting in the way (its radeon, and i heard they aren't as linux friendly as NVidia)
How could expect me to get to a vitual console if it wasn't installed fully?


My girlfriend came home and was horrified i was intalling linux, and tried windows again, but it won't detect that disk at all. ho hum.

thanks for your help, I will try again to install ubuntu, i doubt the gf will have much luck with windows.

howard

When it gives you this error, just do [ctrl] + [alt] + [F5] and it will switch to virtual console 5, where you can read the error.

The console is set up by the installation CD itself. No completed install necessary.

hi bulliver,

This problem seems to have gone away. I started th boot/install process again, and this time the problem just didn't occur.
Thanks for your time though.

//
howard