Just taught myself how to check the iso. The ISO looks like it matches the checksum, but the DVD must no longer match it, even though it didn't tell me of any error. I was burning it from Windows 10, probably using 7zip. Why? My Mom's computer uses Windows 10, so for now, that's what I'm stuck with for installing stuff.

Burning a DVD in windows 7 should be right click on ISO file and select burn as image

That's what I did, except for this is Windows 10, not 7. It USED TO BE Windows 7 on this machine. It's probably working that way because of 7-Zip.

The crazy thing is, it verified OK, and burned OK. I suspect my Mom's disk wasn't stored right.

Good news:
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When I burned to my disk, it works this time.

Bad news:
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I did something wrong with partitioning. Probably didn't give bios grub partition enough space. This time I chose to erase, and let the installer partition. I wanted to erase anyway. I believe I should have given it 100 MB. I gave it 2 MB.

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I can always partition the second drive, after install. The commands I know how to look up, in a heart beat, and all I want to do, is to make the whole thing 1 partition, and mount on /data.

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At least, I "think" it will be easy enough. If not, a third time, I'll reinstall, I guess.

I tried to simply install grub, but it didn't have the device file I needed, when I did chroot. It was asking for /dev/pty.

They are NOT SSDs. Since it got through the whole thing, despite a few small errors, I guess the DVD works this time. If it stays working, which I think it will.

I thought it was entirely a hardware issue. Appearently, everything I did to hardware, helped, anyway!

I'm meeting my goal of being almost an expert at normal installation of Linux Mint 21.1! Just have to go the rest of the way to expert!

I figured out, that it's bugs! It's not anything I did, neccessarily! First of all, it asks you to take out the CD. But if you actually take it out, you can't reboot right. Then, when you get it to reboot right, without the SQUASHFS errors, I think it did most of the work, but I've never seen this bug before. It doesn't really do all the work! I thought that it simply didn't install grub, the first time it did this. So I booted to the live enviroment, and instead of installing, I did a chroot to my / partition, from a terminal (not tty), then I tried to run:

It failed, because it needs pty, which wasn't available. So, I just got done doing an install from scratch again, and this time, I told it to figure out it's own partitioning. It happily did. Although I may have been ignoring my second disk, and I don't know the consequences of that yet, with those settings, there should have been "no excuse", not to boot properly. However, it isn't finishing the installation, for some reason. It's appearing to go through it, but it's not. This is, I guess, a bug. Don't ask me exactly what's still happening, but we're not getting the disk errors anymore. Is there a way to fix this, even with manual work, or "a script"? Or, is this machine not compatible with Linux Mint, effectively. Do I have to have an older version for it to work?

I can save to buy a new (used) machine, if I really have to, but I'd rather try to use this souped up machine for awhile. These are 120 GB hard drives, as detected by everything that can detect things (as aproximate as normal for disks, possibly). Also, it's also written on the hard drives, this capacity. Definately not terrabytes of space, or can't find the rest of the space, but probably not. All the hardware, now works as well as it's going to. The disk works, as well as it's going to, unless a different location for a download, will make a difference. I downloaded from kernel.org. Yes, I used Linux Mint website to get it. I probably have a few disks of it laying around, also from seperate downloads, but I'm not sure where at home.

I don't want to do any compiling from source in order to get this to work. Please advise from here. Thanks!

So i learned that CAN BE what compatibility mode is for. But i guess its either that, or my machine is just too old to be compatible.

The machine isnt compatible with installation. Otherwise something would work. Im going to be trying ubuntu or mageia. But im just getting an extra docking station for what i want to do.

OK. Not solved after all. It can't be not compatible with any Linux, when every installer seems to run perfectly, but none of them will boot. I suspect now, that, even when I let the machine choose, it's not giving me a big enough bios boot partition. When I choose how big, I'm choosing to use 2 MB, which seems to be enough according to what the installers will tell me to choose. But I suspect, it really isn't enough space. All of the distributions will run the install perfectly, and then all of them, the moment they are not off of a live CD, will completely bomb out and not boot, despite successful installations, and I'm certain it's installing the boot loader properly. The Mageia Linux 8, did the same thing, but was more verbose about the success of the bootloader install. This machine doesn't support UEFI, appearently, but it must be just before that.

So, now that I definatly partitioned right, and it still didn't work, with another distribution of Linux, besides Linux Mint, (it did the same thing), I guess it's not compatible. But... Hold on... It's compatible with the Linux kernel, and the rest of Linux. It's clear to me, that it's not compatible with specifically GRUB. But, this is definately related, but different problems from my originol problem. So, I'm continuing in a new thread. I think my hardware issue is solved. I could go pages and pages, maybe, about my new software issue, but now that I know that, to keep things clean, I will start a new thread now. Closing.

https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...74#post6431174

This is the continuation.

So you're scores of posts in and he's still not dishing up the info required, not trying what's suggestions, and not reporting back properly, or some of the above?

I'll just sneak away quietly so...