OT: Linux video crash help please.

[The Natural Philosopher]

?, The Haswell chipset crashed ;0)

[John Rumm]

If its any consolation, there are times getting windows loaded can have its own difficulties as I found the other day...

I was building up an Intel NUC for a customer (if you can call undoing 4 screws, clipping in a SODIM, and a M2 SSD, building!) It needed to be small enough to fit in an existing cabinet that was short on space, and it needed to run Win 7 since there were doubts the software was fully reliable on 10.

What I forgot was that the NUCs are Skylake chipset based, and that means all support for the old EHCI host controller has gone and been superseded by xHCI. So no USB2, only USB3 ports. So you can make yourself a nice bootable USB thumb drive to install from, and its all fine and dandy until you get to the bit where it needs to ask the user something, at which point it can't access mouse or keyboard. (and slapping an unattended XML file on there for a non interactive load don't help either (DAMHIK) cos from after the boot load it can't read the thumb drive either).

Cue lots of fiddling trying to slipstream USB3 drivers into the boot and install files so you can get through the install!

[T i m]

The only consolation will be getting Linux working on this box and getting it to my inlaws John. ;-) [1]

Of course, but in the what may be thousands of Windows installs I've done over my life (including the many per week I was doing when IT training) I have *never* had such a general issue as I have with Linux (and that is no surprise to anyone as 1) most of the hardware was 'designed' for Windows (and not anything else) and 2), I'm not an OS geek). The same box I'm having problems getting Linux to even run here, runs W10 perfectly (and did so as soon as I installed it). Now, the Linux geeks will twist that to say I'm saying 'I've never got Linux running' or 'Windows never fails' but (of course) I'm not saying anything like that at all.

Ok.

So no backward compatibility / legacy USB keyboard support in the BIOS? Would that not cover a kbd in a USB3 port or wasn't it that sort of problem?

Hmm.

I don't know that specific hardware or some of the technical things you mention but my mate in the PC shop is installing (and re-installing) W7- on all sorts of new kit and I can't say I've heard of that but he may never have seen your specific combination.

Cheers, T i m

[1] I was 'helping' mate in the PC shop install Linux (Mint 17.2) on the PC he's just put together. 120G SSD for the system and 2TB for customer data recovery / backups etc.

So, I took him though the installer, putting \ and \home on the SSD and a 'Data' and Swap partition on the std drive. Every time we reboot it comes up with 'problems mounting (what I think is the data partition) and you can Continue, Skip or do Manual stuff (like what I don't know). If you skip it then boots fine and you can then mount the Data partition manually and use it fine?

We just want the f'king thing to work as he does like his (old to be replaced by this) Mint machine and uses it every day (and unlike Windows neither of us have a clue where to go to resolve it). ;-(