Trouble with Installing Mint

ShadowWolf810 · April 20, 2017

Hi all,

So I'm pretty new to Linux, but I've installed Mint a few times on my laptop before. I'm working on building a server, and I thought the hard part would be getting the LAMP stack working, but instead its the install causing problems.

It got to "Installing System" after "copying files" and in the details it says:

mint ntpd[2202]: *public ip* local addr 192.168.1.107 -> <null>

I think part of the issue is that I'm trying to install the OS with a USB stick onto a second USB stick. I formatted the bootable stick with rufus as MBR for BIOS, and it'll boot to the Mint desktop, but when I click install it will only let me partition the USB drive one time and so I can't make a swap partition. But the system has 32 GB of RAM so I doubt it'd ever need it. But everything else works as normal, but I can't get past the installer.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

Wild Penquin · April 20, 2017

I don't think it is adviseable to install onto a USB stick (i.e.: just don't do it). At least don't put a swap file on a USB stick. They might have way lower grade Flash memory and way worse wear levelling (which means, your USB stick might become trash quite soon).

Now that I've got that out of my mouth: So you get message during installation; it seems it has taken the networking down. And hangs there... ? There is not enough information there, and no actual error message.

About partitioning: haven't installed Mint for a while, but there should not be need to do partitioning twice - you do it once, and create all partitions at the same time, after which the actual installation takes place. But maybe it can not create the type of partitions (or partition table, such as in GPT or MBR) it needs on the USB stick, just because they are more limited than real unremovable media - and hangs because of that. But this is just a guess...

ShadowWolf810 · April 21, 2017

9 hours ago, Wild Penquin said:

I don't think it is adviseable to install onto a USB stick (i.e.: just don't do it). At least don't put a swap file on a USB stick. They might have way lower grade Flash memory and way worse wear levelling (which means, your USB stick might become trash quite soon).

Now that I've got that out of my mouth: So you get message during installation; it seems it has taken the networking down. And hangs there... ? There is not enough information there, and no actual error message.

About partitioning: haven't installed Mint for a while, but there should not be need to do partitioning twice - you do it once, and create all partitions at the same time, after which the actual installation takes place. But maybe it can not create the type of partitions (or partition table, such as in GPT or MBR) it needs on the USB stick, just because they are more limited than real unremovable media - and hangs because of that. But this is just a guess...

I think there was just some random issue with trying to use the USB that was causing the hang during install. I was trying to solve the problem without having to go buy an SSD for a boot drive. My problem was that I'm building this media server from a bunch of old hardware I had laying around. I ordered 5 hard drives for the main storage, and was 100% sure that my mobo had 6 sata ports. But alas it had 5. So blew the 70 bucks it was to get the smallest SSD I could find (without ordering online because of time restraints) and a Sata III to USB cable

Yeah I'm not sure what was actually happening with the install. I watched a ton of videos of people installing to external harddrives and USB sticks, but you're correct mine would just hang on a couple various lines rather than giving an error. It would try a ton of servers and just wait for minutes at a time between them. Then on some other occassions it would make some progress and then stop at other places.

The networking was always active because I could ping places, some googling made it appear that it couldn't get the date and time from a time server. Solutions online said to install without internet, which apparently in Mint 18 you can no longer do that in. So I just spent the money.

Next time on: MyLinuxAdventures: I get to see if I installed my LAMP correctly and if I can get Nextcloud working with my domain