Having trouble installing Linux on my laptop

[starry]

My laptop needs a fresh linux install. At this point I've tried 2 different flash drives, an HDD on a usb dongle, and 3 different distros and I havent been able to boot into a live linux usb once. everything seems normal until the logo flashes and the whole system freezes. Any ideas?

Also ive attached a picture of what always flashes on the screen right before it freezes.
Its a dell latitude e4310

[starry]

It was unable to write a an install log

[starry]

UPDATE:

I tried Manjaro linux and it gave what looks like a much more helpful error message

How should i proceed?

[jdfthetech]

please list exact steps you used to create the flash drive

[Nayr438]

The first error only says you drive doesn't have a write cache. It can be ignored.

If you remove quite splash from Grub it will help show where it actually hangs.

You can reference this Fedora guide more info on how to do that. -> https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/22/html/Multiboot_Guide/GRUB-runtime.html

 

 

mount: /run/miso/sfs/livefs ...  /dev/loop0 indicates it can't mount the live file-system.

This is usually the result of a bad ISO image or a bad Install Media.

I would start with re-creating your Installation Media with etcher or Rufus in DD Mode for GPT.

etcher -> https://www.balena.io/etcher/

or from your other Manjaro Install -> yay -Sy chaotic-aur/balena-etcher

[jdfthetech]

41 minutes ago, Nayr438 said:

This is usually the result of a bad ISO image or a bad Install Media.

this is my assumption.  every time I see this sort of problem it's just the iso is being made with something like unetbootin

[starry]

8 hours ago, Nayr438 said:

The first error only says you drive doesn't have a write cache. It can be ignored.

If you remove quite splash from Grub it will help show where it actually hangs.

You can reference this Fedora guide more info on how to do that. -> https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/22/html/Multiboot_Guide/GRUB-runtime.html

 

 

mount: /run/miso/sfs/livefs ...  /dev/loop0 indicates it can't mount the live file-system.

This is usually the result of a bad ISO image or a bad Install Media.

I would start with re-creating your Installation Media with etcher or Rufus in DD Mode for GPT.

etcher -> https://www.balena.io/etcher/

or from your other Manjaro Install -> yay -Sy chaotic-aur/balena-etcher

 

7 hours ago, jdfthetech said:

this is my assumption.  every time I see this sort of problem it's just the iso is being made with something like unetbootin

Sorry for not being very clear in my original post, I will now try to lay out step-by-step what my process was.

I used Balena Etcher for every attempt I've made to install Linux on my laptop, I have tried to rewrite the flash drive at least 4 times this way, nothing has worked.

I have attached screenshots of how I did this below. Keep in mind I did this several times with different distributions (including Mint, Manjaro, and Kubuntu), all of which returned matching checksums for the ISO files, and Ive tired several different flash drives in case i just happened to have two dead flash drives. Every time Ive had the exact same issues. Ive even tried different USB ports on my desktop during the flashing process.

Two things I've considered is that my laptop's single USB port might have issues, or that all six of my flash drives and the USB HDD I tried are bad but I'm not really sure.

 

 

I also did disable the quiet splash screen, I have attached a video of it hanging up. Thank you both so much for replying, and for helping me with my problem.

 

Video of hangup with quiet splash disabled: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/r90a1k83hdlr5ke/Linux Install Hangup.mp4

 

If you need anything else at all please let me know

[jdfthetech]

I would suggest trying it with dd

 

https://medium.com/@tbeach/use-unix-dd-command-to-os-bootable-on-usb-drive-6671945d95a6

 

Just be careful to write to the correct drive.  You can do lsblk to make sure you have the correct device rather than using the command in the tutorial

 

[Nayr438]

General Protection Fault. Something went wrong when it was accessing the systems memory. You could potentially have a bad ram stick.

I would start with running a memtest on the system. If it passes we can look into other possibilities.

 

 

[starry]

2 minutes ago, Nayr438 said:

General Protection Fault. Something went wrong when it was accessing the systems memory. You could potentially have a bad ram stick.

I would start with running a memtest on the system. If it passes we can look into other possibilities.

 

 

computer just reset %50 of the way through the test, will troubleshoot and find out which stick it is and let you know what happens then

[starry]

21 minutes ago, Nayr438 said:

General Protection Fault. Something went wrong when it was accessing the systems memory. You could potentially have a bad ram stick.

I would start with running a memtest on the system. If it passes we can look into other possibilities.

 

 

I found the culprit, put it in my broken bin and swapped for a different stick, now it boots into the live USB with no issues. Its always something really dumb that causes the biggest problems huh?

Thank you so much for helping, really appreciate it.

[jdfthetech]

15 hours ago, Nayr438 said:

General Protection Fault. Something went wrong when it was accessing the systems memory. You could potentially have a bad ram stick.

I would start with running a memtest on the system. If it passes we can look into other possibilities.

 

 

Did you find this in the vid?  Great catch if so.  I generally don't download vids due to security stuff.

[Nayr438]

1 hour ago, jdfthetech said:

Did you find this in the vid?  Great catch if so.  I generally don't download vids due to security stuff.

Yes. It could also explain why it couldn't mount the live filesystem on the other distros. It would of become corrupt during decompression for mount.

 

As far as security, I generally don't worry to much. I don't keep anything sensitive on my system, it would need root to damage anything and I can verify and repair my arch install fairly quick if it did. Nearly all my online accounts require 2 factor auth. Heck you can wipe all installed packages minus base and reinstall without ever leaving the desktop in arch.