I'm trying to set up a server for my Factorio game and I'm installing Linux Mint for the first time since I last used Ubuntu back in 2009, so I'm a bit rusty. I've booted into a live session from my USB stick, but I'm getting stuck at the part where it installs multimedia codecs. It has been frozen for ten minutes, so I restarted it without checking the codecs, but it's still stuck. I've read that this might be an issue related to NTFS formatting. My system has two SSDs, both formatted to NTFS, and one of them probably still has a Windows installation on it since the PC hasn't been used for five years. Do I need to reformat these drives to a different file system before proceeding with the installation? I've heard some people say to unplug the drives due to potential bugs, but if I do that, I can't install anything on them. Any help would be appreciated!
3 Answers
Linux won't install on NTFS, but there should be an option to erase everything during the installation process. If you didn’t see that, you can use GParted to wipe the drive clean. Usually, you don't have to do this, but it might be worth unplugging the drive that's not part of your installation to avoid any confusion.
First off, Linux doesn't run on NTFS format. For Linux Mint, the default file system is ext4. You don’t actually need to format the drives yourself; the Mint installer will handle that during installation. If you can, share more details about your disk selection or any settings you've chosen—if I could see a picture of it, that would help out a lot!
Is Mint not using btrfs for installations? I thought it would be the go-to option now.
It should be showing your SSDs correctly, right? You've got two 500GB drives, correct? When I type 'lsblk' in the terminal, it shows my drives properly too.
Make sure to check out some installation tips available online. Always connect via an Ethernet cable for a smoother experience, and don't forget to remove the boot media when you're finished! 🙂
I opened GParted and tried to delete and format the drives to ext4, but I ran into an error when it came to creating the new file system.