Installing Fresh Mint Distro

[gatorb]

My cousin drowned in the Ohio river but not before he threw his Dell Inspiron laptop out his window and cracked the screen and crashed the hard drive. I loved my cousin but he was an alcoholic and didn't have patience.
I replaced the screen and installed a 500 mb hard drive. I installed a live Linux mint distro and ran a terminal session and used the command sudo badblocks -v /dev/sda and no bad blocks or sectors were found.
Pass completed 0 bad blocks found. (0/0/0 errors).
My problem is when I try to install Mint on the hard drive it crashes and says it's due to a faulty cd/dvd drive or bad had drive. I tried creating an
ISO image and using Rufus and browsing for the ISO image and making it bootable and of course changing the boot order.
I also tried a DVD using a lower speed because I heard this could corrupt the image. I keep getting the same error telling me I have a faulty cd/dvd or hard drive. I tested the hard drive with no errors and I tried a thumb drive ruling out the DVD drive.
Any suggestions would be welcomed. By the way when I run it live it works fine

 

[atanere]

Sorry about your cousin!

So, the first thing I'd suggest is that you "verify" the Linux Mint .iso file that you downloaded. Even though it runs fine in live mode, your failure is during installation... and there are other things going on at that point. It's really a good idea to always verify a Linux .iso file that you download. If you are using Linux to burn the .iso to DVD and USB, you can use just open a terminal in the folder where the .iso is stored and use the sha256sum <filename> command to get the SHA256 checksum value. You would then compare that to the checksum provided by the Mint team here (for Mint 18.3).

If you're using Windows (suspected since you were using Rufus), there is a nice free program here that can help you to verify the checksum.

If your .iso file properly verifies, then we know it is complete and not corrupted... so we know it is safe to install free from defects. If it doesn't verify, then you need to download it again.

If it verifies and you still have the installation errors, then please be more specific. You said, "I keep getting the same error telling me I have a faulty cd/dvd or hard drive." and we would like to know EXACTLY what that error says so that Google might help to give a more accurate solution. As you've said, you're trying to install from USB, so the CD/DVD is not at fault here... and your hard drive shows no bad sectors. I think we need a little more to go on.

And tell us even more... there are many Dell Inspirion laptop models... which do you have? Does it have UEFI? Are you trying to make Linux the only system, or are you trying to dual boot with Windows? If dual booting, which Windows?

Thanks