[SOLVED] Help needed installing Ubuntu MATE on a Acer Aspire 5742

[ottimo_massimo]

Hi,

I’m pulling my hair out trying to get an old Acer Aspire 5742 to boot from a USB pen drive, or a dvd drive for that matter. The flash drive seems to hold the most promise, but I am presented with the following error after the flash drive is selected as the first boot media from the BIOS menu:
Remove disks or other media
Press any key to restart

blah, blah…
Broadcom UNBI PXE-2.1 v12.2.0
blah, blah…
PKE-E61: media test failure , check cable

After that the machine will boot windows 7.

I’ve played with pretty much any BIOS option available to me. Swapping between SATA modes has no effect.

The laptop is currently running windows 7, system BIOS V1.10 and it’s got an Intel i3 with 2GB of RAM.

I’ve tried booting from both the 32 bit and 64 bit ISOs on the flash disk. Same result for both (as above). I’m using a HP v210w 8GB USB pen drive as the boot media.

So, I guess I’ve got three questions:

1. Has anybody successfully installed Ubuntu MATE on the Acer Aspire 5742?
2. If so, which version of Ubuntu MATE?
3. And in which way (flash disk, DVD)?

Thanks in advance!

[wolfman]

Hi,

did you fully format the USB stick before creating your bootable media and did you try downloading a fresh ISO from a different mirror?:

How to use Unetbootin

If unetbootin doesn't work for you, try "mintstick". You should (can) also install udisks2 in Ubuntu 15.10 and higher!: http://pkgs.org/search/mintstick http://pkgs.org/download/udisks2 Firstly, download your preferred version of Ubuntu Mate OS, 32 or 64 Bit (if you are unsure, download the 32 Bit version) (Ubuntu/Debian/Voyager/PinguyOS etc) in the form of an ISO file, remember where you store the file!. (I am not talking about using the Unetbootin download function, I am talking about yo…

See also:

Burn ISO's at the slowest possible speed

Hi all, as the title suggests, some and/or many problems with your installation can be avoided by burning the ISO file at the "SLOWEST POSSIBLE SPEED", most if not all burner apps will automatically choose the fastest speed available for your disk burner drive so it is important before you commit to burn a CD/DVD that you select the menu tab which controls the burn speed and select the lowest number on offer. Your burner drive may well support a burn speed of 20 X for DVD and 60 X for CD's a…

[ottimo_massimo]

Hi,

Thanks for the reply. Yep, I reformatted the flash drive before attempting the install. I’ll read through those links you sent on and report back.

[ottimo_massimo]

Thanks for the links, Unetbootin worked perfectly first time!

[wolfman]

Hi @ottimo_massimo,

please mark as solved so it helps others (Put a tick in the box at the bottom of the best answer!).