Serious error on first attempts to dual boot Ubuntu 14.04 with Win7

Question

I downloaded Ubuntu 14.04 from the website which I saved to my desktop with WinRar. My trial with winrar had expired so I have now tried it with Active@Isoburner but I'm getting no further. I eventually got it burnt onto a DVD(4.7gb) and tried to boot from DVD and normally. Neither way works.

It looks like its about to boot but then a message appears saying that a serious error has occurred...the disk drive for /tmp is not ready yet or not present...press I to ignore, s to skip or m for manual...

At this point I'm lost and unsure what to do. My laptop Toshiba Equium A210-17I is over 5 or 6 years old. Available space on the Hard Drive is 24gb. 2gb RAM. It originally came with Windows Vista Home Premium edition but about a year ago or more a friend wiped it clean for me as I was having no end of problems with Vista. He installed Windows 7 Ultimate(which I don't have a disc for).

How can I resolve this issue and get Ubuntu to boot up? Do I have to install a previous version of Ubuntu first? Any advice or help would be greatly appreciated. Kind regards. Beetle.

Answer 1

First

If you need to, download the .iso from here from ubuntu http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop and this time just leave the .iso as is and do not compress the file. (You have to right-click on the .iso to burn the Ubuntu installation disk).

If you copy and paste the .iso into the DVD folder and burn it, it will not work.

The following was taken from http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/burn-a-dvd-on-windows

Next . . .

How to burn a DVD using Windows7/8

To install Ubuntu on a computer that currently runs Windows, you need to download the installation file and burn it onto the DVD, which you can then use to install Ubuntu. Once you’ve downloaded the file, closely follow the instructions below to burn your DVD.

When you are done, the burned DVD should contain a few files and should look something like this

If the contents of the burned DVD is the single .iso file like this, you did something wrong.

Next

Insert the DVD in the DVD drive, save any unsaved work you may have on your computer, and power-off the device.

Turn the computer back on and make sure your BIOS settings are set to boot the DVD drive First on the list of boot devices.

On the Toshiba Satellite, F12 is the button you need to press to enter the BIOS settings directly after turning on the computer (Your's may be different). Select save and exit and your computer should boot Ubuntu properly.

Finally

It is usually recommended you use a USB device to install Ubuntu rather than a DVD if your device is capable of selecting a USB drive as a boot device. The BIOS setting for a USB installation is the same as for the DVD; place the USB drive at the top of you list of boot devices to boot first.

You will need to download Universal-USB-Installer-1.9.5.3.exe

More information can be found at the following:

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/universal-usb-installer-easy-as-1-2-3/

http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/create-a-usb-stick-on-windows

http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/burn-a-dvd-on-windows

http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TrustyTahr/ReleaseNotes

If you run into any errors, please post them.

Answer 2

There is a quick and simple command-line way to burn a Live DVD using Command Prompt.

First, open the Start menu and type command or cmd, click on Command Prompt.

Then, run the following command followed by a space, your DVD drive letter, colon, space, and the location (or path) of your iso file in quotations.

isoburn.exe /q

For expample, if my DVD drive is labeled as drive "D:" and the .iso file of ubuntu is saved to my desktop as "ubuntu-14.04.iso" I would run this command to burn the Live disk.

isoburn.exe /q D: "C:\Users\mchid\Desktop\ubuntu-14.04.iso"

BTW, you can drag and drop the iso into the command prompt to fill in the path for you if you don't feel like typing the location of the file.