Upgrading from Hardy

[Colin Law]

On 4 February 2016 at 19:08, Gregory Gamble <greg.gamble at uwa.edu.au> wrote:
> Dear Nils
>
> Thanks for all the assistance so far. I thought I'd let you know how I was getting on.
> It seems I must have corrupted something important with my early forays into installing lucid ...
> all attempts without erasing everything and starting afresh failed.
>
> So I copied all my important files to some 8GB USB sticks ... and tried a from-scratch erasing-everything
> install of Lucid. This succeeded. Somewhere in this process I found that the USB sticks were indeed
> coming up as options for booting from when I hit the F12 button after start up. This was me not understanding
> how it all worked ... I thought I had to hit F2 and change the order of priority ... look at HDD, then ... .
>
> Anyway, I managed to install a working Lucid system.
>
> So next I tried to install Trusty from the boot-usb stick, but I just got a black screen.
> After reading a bit more, I found I could do: apt-get install usb-creator-gtk and then use the Make StartUp Disk tool
> to create a bootable USB stick ... so I tried that ... and it seemed to be working but I was using same the image as for
> the boot-usb stick ... and while it looked to be working it eventually went black screen too. So I thought perhaps it
> was the image file that was the problem ... so I downloaded a slightly later version and used the same method of
> creating a Trusty image on a USB stick. This one worked ... or at least it gave me a screen where it gave me the option
> to install like Lucid, so I went through the same process ... but partway through the screen went all funny and that
> was that.

>From the initial boot screen on the stick you should get an option to
check the image (if you see a little keyboard symbol and a stick man
when you boot hit any key and that will take you into the initial
menu).  Select the option to check the image, it may take 10 or 20
mins and you may think it has died, but just leave it till it either
says it has passed or it has failed.  If that is ok then select the
option to Try Ubuntu.  That will show whether your machine is capable
of running that version of Ubuntu.  Only if that also succeeds is it
worth trying to install.

Colin