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Installation Halts on Black Screen

Quaestor

Fri Jul 04, 2014 2:08:24 am

I'm trying to install Zorin OS 8.1 64-bit on a Toshiba Satellite L75D-A7280 notebook. The first menu comes up as expected, then I select "Start the installer directly." The Zorin splash screen appears. Then there's a lot of text. Then total blackness.

BTW, this pc uses an AMD A6 quad core CPU.

Is there a work-around?

Quaestor

Fri Jul 04, 2014 2:31:01 am

Using these options: forcevesa acpi=off nomodeset I was able to avoid the black screen and get to the installer, but now I've run into a new problem. This machine has Windows 8.1 pre-installed. I had to disable secure boot and UEFI in BIOS in order to get my Zorin Live DVD to boot, but the Zorin installer says there is no detected operating system. This is clearly not the case, but if I use GParted I'm worrying that GRUB will fail to incude Windows as a boot option. help please.

Swarfendor437

Fri Jul 04, 2014 12:02:11 pm

Hi please follow the tutorial that I posted a link to here:

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=6500

Keep us posted! :D

Quaestor

Fri Jul 04, 2014 1:21:19 pm

I used Gparted to shrink the main NTFS partition. From the freed-up space I made a EXT4 partition, a swap space, and a BIOS space. Then I proceeded with the install. After the reboot GRUB displayed only Linux boot options, no Windows. I switched back to UEFI secure boot, which allow me to get back to Windows 8.1. Then I downloaded EasyBSD and installed it, however EasyBSD didn't show any Linux partition. Really frustrated.

Swarfendor437

Fri Jul 04, 2014 5:23:52 pm

Well if Matthew Moore was on here he'd get 6000 blue jewels:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlTgaWs9BD0

Quaestor

Sat Jul 05, 2014 8:21:54 pm

The installation was a success, finally. However, I couldn't get much satisfaction from Zorin or any Debian derivative I tried (Ubuntu and Linux Mint). The only startup option that avoided the black screen was forcevesa , which seemed to cause sluggish rewrites. So I installed OpenSuSe 13.1 instead. Getting GRUB installed on the system partition instead of the MBR was very easy in OpenSuSe, and EasyBSD worked better this last time as well.

Startup is a bit slow since you've got to use to bootloaders in succession, but the ability to scrap Linux cleanly by just deleting the partition is worth the wait, I suppose.

Swarfendor437

Sun Jul 06, 2014 10:38:37 am

Well before my Hitachi DeathStar goes west with 8.1 on it I will try and do a tutorial video on Zorin 9 using the same method as used by Matthew Moore! :D