Hi! Continuing here this conversation from the giveaway thread. Let's see if the quoting somehow works... It's adamhm who I was talking with.
Lastly, my problem with Mint 18 is that the installer completely freezes my computer. The first couple of times I clicked the desktop icon and I thought the computer was just blocked reading the USB stick. When I saw it was actually stuck after a while I tried to run the installer from the command line to see the error messages. I tried to run ubiquity (right?), and as soon as I typed the command and pressed enter my computer instant-froze. No response to keyboard, mouse, nothing.
Does your system have an Nvidia GPU? The open source Nvidia drivers aren't very good and with certain GPUs can cause random freezes. There is a way around it/"safe mode" but it's probably not worth worrying about now since you have 17.3 installed & working ok.
No, I have an old AMD Radeon HD 7700. Anyway you gave me an idea and I've tried disabling it and using the motherboard's graphics chip. The result is the same, frozen system, so I don't think it's a graphics problem.
However this happens booting from the USB in compatibility mode. In UEFI mode (the default mode) the installer runs fine. The problem is I already have Windows 7 installed, and I get this scary message saying that Windows is installed using "BIOS compatibility mode" and if I install Mint in UEFI mode I might not be able to boot Windows anymore. This is the
exact message (picture not mine, it comes from
this reddit of somebody with the same problem).
I'm ok with making mistakes and reinstalling Mint over and over again :-D, but I have quite a lot of stuff in that Windows and I can't afford losing it. Therefore, to BIOS compatibility mode I go.
And that is a new level of pain. First, it will boot only from a USB 2.0 port (took a while to realise that), and most times it won't boot at all. Checking the media integrity works well, but when booting it blocks for minutes and finally gives read errors ("bad USB cable?", it says, which is simply not true). When it actually boots, it takes ages to launch the graphic desktop, whereas in UEFI mode that's instantaneous. And finally, the main problem is the Mint 18 installer doesn't work at all.
The same problems to boot in compatibility mode happen with Mint 17.3, but at least the few times it actually boots the installer works.
Anyway... Mint 17.3 is installed now, and The Witcher 2 is running, so all is well for now. This post is not really looking for answers to these obscure problems, but rather thinking aloud and bumping the guide :)