Hi from a Linux noob millionth time

Here's what I've got, and this is what I want to do. Attached is my speccy screen .
I have played around just a tad in the past with Linux, and have decided to dedicate my 500gig drive as a Linux system. With Linux, I want to play with media files, surf the internet, I would like to use the linux version of slsk (soulseek) mostly for the chat rooms, but I also do download small unsigned bands' music . What would be a good distro that I could set up as a boot select, not a live CD, but an actual dedicated 500gig drive . A distro that isn't too hard for someone as new to Linux as myself, but the same distro needs to be robust enough to expand as a learn more and DO more with it. At this time, I'm not thinking of programming, but it is certainly not out of the question in the future.
I guess, bottom line im looking for a distro that is easy to get started with, yet flexible enough that as I mature as a Linux user, im not stuck with a distro that has "training wheels" so to speak .
Oh, and hardware recognition is important, as I have a quad core and a relatively high-end GPU .

I hope this makes sense .
Thanks !

 

Yeah so ubuntu forums will not load. I just want to install a good linux on an existing 500gb internal , and be able to choose whether i boot into 7 or linux .
Still googling, alot of conflicting/bizzare information out there on this

 

Meh it's all good. I'll just experiment until I find something I like, assuming I can get one to work .

 

Still trying to get one working .

 

I am not sure i understand why you can not load Linux.

Just for the hell of it i put my Linux mint CD in the drive and a one point it asks me where i want to install it (i have 5 HDDs)

http://www.linuxmint.com/download.php

I have this already installed and it dual boots without any problem.

 

Ok thanks bill ill try that one right now . Ooh wait is that a free distro ?

 

Yes it's free

 

Ok, I've been trying to install BLAG on my empty 500gig HD, and it keeps telling me theres not enough free space . I am using the live disk right now . I'm just trying to get a hang of this.
So I should click your link, and burn the CD, then i can install to my HD i have emptied out for this purpose ? Also, I will DL the 64 bit version, and try that one just so you know.

 

ok Im going to have to exit BLAG because it wont let me download MINT, BLAG says my empty 500gig HD doesnt have enough empty space to download it. I'll use windows to download it .

 

Ok saving 64 bit version to USB drive. Hope this works, I was able to run BLAG from a live disk, but i want a dedicated drive as indicated earlier. Thanks for your direction !

 

Don't just save it.
Burn it to a CD and then put it in your CD/DVD drive and reboot the PC it will automatically start to load and on the third or fourth page it will ask you where you want to install it so then select your drive and continue.
When it is installed and you reboot you will see a screen that asks which OS you want to load so you can select Linux or Windows.

 

Awesome. I have it downloaded . Now attempting to burn and then install . Thanks !

 

All done ! Worked just like you said it would ! Big thanks to you ! I have a whole new environment to play with now !

 

Glad it worked out for you.
Linux Mint is one of the newest distro's and it is a fairly short learning curve so good luck.

 

FED UP, glad you got yourself up and running with Linux. If in the future you decide that you want to get into the nuts and bolts of Linux, I would recommend partitioning that 500GB hard drive and add a 20 gig partition and install Arch Linux.

Mint is an very good, easy to navigate distro. For users just starting out with linux, it is one of my choices that I normally recommend. If you want everything + the kitchen sink, Ultimate Edition 2.9 is a awesome choice as well.

All the best,

Ian

 

MINT crashed and I could NOT fix it even from the recovery console . I spent the entire day figuring out how to get rid of the Linux partitions on the dedicated drive, and wound up having to re-install Windows 7 because of the boot screen. Even using my Windows 7 disk and the repair installtion would not repair it . Mint worked the first few times i booted it up, then it would freeze during bootup and I would have to hard off the computer . Left a REALLY bad taste in my mouth. I'll stick with Windows now, thanks just the same .

 

I second Ian's opinion of Mint and it is also the distro I recommend to the "linux-curious" folks. IMO, it really is the easiest way for a new person to get acclimated while migrating from Windows.

However, I respectfully disagree (only slightly!) with his advice regarding Arch Linux. Everything he says is true, and his recommendation is solid, but I believe a better solution would be to use VirtualBox and create a 20GB Arch Linux virtual machine. For a newbie, this will provide the working environment for "tinkering" and learning, like Ian suggests, but with the added safety net of NOT jeopardizing your entire OS in the event of catastrophe...and we've all had a catastrophe at some point that we wish we would "do over."

With VirtualBox, you can! Set up your VM in VB; export the appliance to a backup directory; and tinker away... Catastophic failure that you just can't undo, or fix? No problem, delete the VM; import your backed up VM from the backup directory; resume hacking/tinkering with NO RISK whatsoever to your primary OS!

Once you've lost that newbie shine and acquired a few more linux skillz, go ahead and try it without the safety net (VirtualBox VM)...and do it the way Ian suggests!

 

Yeah. I'm sure I let my frustration get the best of me when i hacked out that post .
I'll cool off and try again soon . . . .
I need to get virtualbox for sure .

 

no worries man...no one is forcing you to give this a shot (are they?!), it's YOUR choice...and that is what Linux is all about.

FWIW, VirtualBox has a windows version. Maybe you should start your transition there? You can download & install VB on your Windows machine, and then install Mint (or another distro of your choice) as a VM on your Windows host. Once you find one you like, burn a LiveCD and boot your machine from the LiveCD in order to see how compatible your machine's hardware is with the distro you like. If the LiveCD crashes, DO NOT install that distro to your hard drive.

Mint is pretty user-friendly and has a pretty wide hardware compatibility, but if Mint doesn't like a piece of hardware on your machine, you might want to consider Ubuntu, which Mint is based on. IMO, Mint is perfect for newbies, but if it isn't an option for you, I personally prefer Ubuntu, which generally has a reputation for the highest degree of hardware compatibility; but no distro is compatible with everything.

If Mint or Ubuntu don't suit you, I'd suggest sticking with one of the other top distros on "Distrowatch", such as Fedora, PCLinuxOS, Debian, or OpenSUSE. While some are more challenging than others, all have pretty good user forums and knowledge bases, which is all important for troubleshooting in the Linux community.

Then again, Major Geeks has BOOMM, Hawklord, and Ian...all of whom have helped me solve a problem at some point after the Ubuntu forum failed to provide a solution. They're more than Majors, they're "Geeks in Chiefs" :-D

 

I have no idea why it would crash as Mint is very a stable distro ?????? mine has been installed for months and i have never had a problem with it.

Can you remember anything about the crash and maybe we can find the answer.

To get rid of it all you have to do is format the partition and it will be gone.

 

When i would choose MINT from the boot screen, the screen would go black and hang . I would wait for a long time, but it was hung . I tried to boot into the MINT recovery console and the same thing happened .

Then once I figured out how to get rid of the MINT partitions on the dedicated drive, and format the drive, I was still stuck with the boot screen, and when I finally got rid of that when I would power up the computer i would get a message with a prompt that said something like "Grub error:" with a flashing cursor . I tried everything I could find on google from another computer, but nothing would work , even using my Win 7 repair install would not fix it. This is why I went ahead and reinstalled 7 , which isn't that huge of a problem because I use an F40 SSD for my OS .
I just don;t know what happened. I still have my BLAG live cd to play with when i feel like it .

 

First a point for future reference.
If you want to remove an OS from the boot menu all you have to do is click "start" and type "run" in the search bar then in the run search bar type "msconfig" this will take you to a window where you select "boot" (see photo) there you can delete any OS you do not want on the boot list.

The "grub error" is a boot fault that normally it is looking for a disk with the OS on, normally there is a number after "grub error"

 

Bill is correct about the GRUB error. And it definitely appears that GRUB can't locate the OS you want to boot. It appears the grub menu needs editing/configuring, which calls for a LiveCD.

However, I'm not sure what needs done to accommodate your 3 drives? I was looking at your original post screenshot and your multiple hard drives, showing up as SATA internals. I have 3 hard drives, but 2 are external usb drives that are used for NAS only; I disconnected them when I installed Ubuntu as a dual boot on this machine, because the Ubuntu installer kept attempting to install the OS on one of the external devices sdb or sdc and I was lucky enough to catch this before the final installation. Upon disconnecting the usb drives, I installed on the internal hard drive sda with no problems whatsoever.

Following a similar path of logic, I wonder if you've installed Mint and, correspondingly, the boot flag on the 500GB partition (sdb or sdc), with your Windows OS on the main hard drive (sda), and it can't boot from that device/partition?

If that's the case, I don't know how to advise you to fix it, but I believe Ian (ichase) has his system setup in this manner...with different OS booting from external devices? Perhaps he'll chime in with his thoughts?

 

It's fixed already / I went into DISK MANAGEMENT and deleted partitions, then formatted the LINUX drive, leaving me with the boot problem, followed by the GRUB error. I could not get into MSCONFIG to fix the GRUB error, because the error prevented ANYTHING from booting. I was stuck in a loop of GRUB ERROR : (cursor) and no choice but to reboot - I could only access BIOS, and tried different boot orders . I googled the problem from another computer, could find NO grub error/boot problem solution, except for using WIN 7 REPAIR INSTALL, so I tried my WIN 7 disk: repair install (4 or 5 times). This never worked, and since my OS is by itself on an F40 SSD, I just went ahead and reinstalled WIN 7, didn't take long at all to re-install, but had HUGE problem installing SP1, finally got that resolved with help from someone here at MG . All is well at this time, when I feel like jacking around with linux again, I've already got several LIVE CD's burned I can use, no need to install on HD and go through this mess again . Took a LONG time to figure out the SP1 not installing problem, but solved it in this thread : http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=241279
(Special thanks to thisisu) .

This is exactly what was happening, I thought about simply disconnecting my 500gb drive (the one with MINT installed) but knew I'd have to deal with it sooner or later, I just wanted my computer back .
I do appreciate all who have offered advice. I'm not done with linux, but I'd like to know :

What do you folks do with your LINUX that canNOT be done with Windows ?
Just curious .
:wave

 

Here is something you might want to try. This is a Ubuntu windows installer, This automatically detects the systems hardware, and downloads the correct version.
If you have a 64 bit system, Linux must be the 64 bit version to run a lone side windows 7.
http://www.ubuntu.com/download/ubuntu/windows-installer

 

I see FedUP has migrated back to Win7.

LinuxMint 64 is migrating to Debian based instead of Ubuntu and the issues described as black screen is usually a video driver that does not load on the boot disk. I will move to LM myself for my desktop.

 

When setting up MINT, it did, in fact, download the driver for my HD 6970 , and was working fine. I had booted back and forth between 7 and MINT several times, partially just to see if it was all working properly - and all was fine for a while. If I remember correctly (my memory span is about 5 minutes lol) MINT didn't tank until I has turned my computer completely off for a bit and the came back . Also, I had installed MINT on an empty 500g internal, I wasnt booting from a live disk .
Also, can you explain what you mean by "I will move to LM myself for my desktop."
LinuxMint for your desktop ? I don't understand . .:confused

 

I dislike the Unity desktop for Ubuntu 11.04 and so will migrate to LinuxMint Debian next. It is not a priority right now though.

 

I moved to Linux as a desktop, and a home server because it's less maintenance. Than Windows and viruses don't effect the operating system at all. I have a lot of Java based games that works well with Windows on the server. I use it for storing everything from movies to music. That can be streamed to the other computers in the house.

 

i know this is resolved, but there are a few points to note for other readers,

1 -

the reason for this is is probably because the mint download was saving to the cd not the hard drive,
blag was running from live cd, there is limited temporary space on a live cd,
a cd is only around 700mb's, mint is just under 700mb's - but blag was already on the cd,
mint cannot be downloaded to the downloads file on the cd, there is physically not enough space,

i've added a piccy to show, its a 30gb xp vm with xubuntu live cd loaded and downloading mandriva (bit long winded way but it shows the problem)

2 - the boot issue when the install of mint was removed is a common problem for newbies,
grub was added to the mbr of the win7 drive allowing to dual boot,
the grub boot files were on the mint drive,
erasing mint erased the boot files but grub was still in the mbr of the windows drive,
grub cannot find the boot files because they have been erased,

the windows drive needed grub replacing with the win7 bootloader,
never done this with vista/win7 but with w2k/xp then its just a matter of booting with the windows cd and entering the recovery console and using the commands

fixboot
fixmbr

ntldr will now have replaced grub allowing normal booting into windows,

here is a win7 way of doing it, as i said, i have never tried it but its similar to the w2k/xp way

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/681-startup-repair.html

 

hawklord-
That sounds like it's probably what happened. Sad part is, the experience soured me on Linux, and now I can't think of any reason to even toy with Linux anymore. This can certainly be chalked up to my lack of Linux knowledge, but I think i'm STILL done with Linux. I had previously toyed with a couple of other live CD distros, and found them very barebones (i know thats part of the point of Linux) and just not really what I want.
I guess I'm too comfortable in Windows. I'll leave Linux to, well, the people that like it.

Thanks for your input !

 

don't give up, really

i've never had much luck with debian based systems - ubuntu, mint, kubuntu etc,
they just won't play 'out of the box' on my hardware for some strange reason,
so i use redhat based systems, mainly mandriva and pclos,

on my main machine (which is this one) i have mandriva installed, it does everything and everything is detected and working (apart from bluetooth remote control with my nokia mobile - but it works with my sony-ericsson :confused)
it took me a while but the benefits outweigh the headaches

mines not a 'play about' machine its a fully working multi-media center and games machine,
it won't play the latest and greatest games - but it plays enough to keep me amused,

live cd's are for 'try before you buy' sort of concept,
a complete install is a different game altogether,

but as with the linux mindset - its your choice,

i wrote this little piece a while ago on dual booting, its a little out-dated now but parts are still relevant and (i believe cause i wrote it) its still worth a read

http://www.geekstogo.com/forum/topic/254158-dual-booting-linux-and-windows/

 

@ Hawklord - Nice to see you again, it's been a long time.
@ Fed-up - As James said, no one is forcing you to continue on the linux journey. I personally have never dual booted with Win7 but I have had up to 6 OS's installed including XP on one machine.
The key which has worked over and over for me is having the hard drive properly partitioned. Many people partition in many ways. Some choose to have an individual partition for their "home" folder for each OS, I on the other hand do not.
Here is an example, you have let's say an 120 Gig hard drive. If you only want to run windows and a flavor of linux you would create 3 partitions. 1 for windows, 1 for Linux and 1 Swap partition. (Think of swap like your paging file in windows) this partition only needs to be twice the amount of RAM you have onboard. If you are running 2 gigs of ram, then make swap 4gigs (even though I have noticed, unless you are running a lot of programs simultaneously then swap will never be used) But it's good to have. Always have windows installed first on the first partition. Then Linux on the second. Most Linux OS's are straight forward and will have you write grub to the MBR. In most cases the menu.lst (in legacy grub) or the grub.cfg (in grub2) will add your windows partition to the grub menu. There you just select whether you want to boot into windows or boot into linux.

Parted Magic in my opinion the best tool out there for partitioning drives as well as the other many many tools it comes with. Loads directly into RAM. It even recognized most wireless chipsets so you can open up the web browser to search for things if you run into issues.

Live CD's are the best way to go. Let's you play around with the distro without the hassle of installing it. Virtual machines are also a great way to play.

This is a good site to help you choose a distro (OS) Linux Distribution Chooser you answer a few questions and based on your answers it gives you some choices of what linux distro make work best for you.

I hope you do not give up on Linux. I have been with it for just shy of a year and I still have those moments where I feel like an idiot but the more you play the more you learn. Not to mention the virtual plethera of information out there to learn from.

All of the above is just my opinions. We users of Linux really enjoy when others jump on board the linux train and we are a friendly bunch who will help in anyway possible. I'm where I am now due to people like Hawklord (who assisted me in my first install of Mandriva 2010.0 September of last year) and Hedon James, BOoMM, plodr to name a few who are all very knowledgable and always willing to help.


All the best,

Ian

 

EasyBCD is an alternative to using lilo or grub, if booting in a window 7 environment, just install the Linux boot loader (GRUB, Lilo) to the partition Linux is installed on, install EasyBCD with Windows 7 and follow the instructions. This route leaves your MBR with windows. I usually dual boot PCLinuxOS with XP Pro but used EasyBCD when trying the Windows 7 BETA and Release Candidate., also use Puppy Linux on occasion.

 

Bwa, ha, ha...Ian thinks I'm knowledgeable!!!

Hawk, BOOMM, plodr, and YOU are knowledgeable! I am just computer accident-prone, persistent enough to pursue a "permanent" fix, and able to google fairly well. Plus, I know some pretty smart fellas on MG!! (I am always willing to help, though...that part is true!) I'm quite flattered to be mentioned in that group, but truth be told, I'm just riding their coat tails. And I'm okay with that!!!:cool