<Sort of solved> "Unable to find a medium containing a live file system"

[gold_finger]

Every distro I tried booting up experienced the same problem and that was not with being seen or being booted to. I was able to at least begin booting to the Live stick with every distro I tried. Each attempt reached the second splash screen, then went to command line and gave the first of the errors.

Maybe it's the graphics card -- you might need to use "nomodeset" to boot until after install, then you can install proprietary driver at that time.  Boot with Mint 17.3 installed on computer now and post back following terminal output so we can see full specs of computer:

Code:

inxi -Fxz

I'm leaning towards something being amiss with the way I'm creating the USB stick. I tried creating with MintStick and UNetBootin,....


... created the bootable stick via the dd command. I got the same, exact result.

You've now tried a variety of ways to make USB, so don't think that is the problem.  Leaning toward graphics card being the culprit; or maybe something changed with the newer kernel on LL (and others) vs. one used by Mint 17.

I'm in the process of downloading the latest Linux Mint. Since that's the only thing I've ever run on either of my laptops I figure it's worth a try, just to see if this thing will boot to a live stick loaded with Mint.

Yes, good idea.  I was thinking the same thing since you were able to install it before.  Honestly, I'll be surprised if Mint Xfce 18.1 works and LL doesn't because they're both very similar.


If you are able to boot new Mint USB normally, confirm that it got booted in Legacy mode with this command:

Code:

ls /sys/firmware

If you see "efi" in the output, it's booted in UEFI mode.  If not, you're correctly booted in Legacy mode -- which we want in this case so we can compare apples to apples.