Installation always freezes somewhere between 20% and 90% into the process

[Rolf]

Hello I'm a Norwegian Gnu-Linux enthusiast and I've tried many distributions in the past.
Recently I've gotten three HP 6715b laptops given up by my schools and I've tried to install many different (at least 10 different distros)flavours of Linux on them.
With almost all distributions the problem has been that I can't make the distribution recognize the laptop's wireless card and I gave them up.
One distro "deepin" recognized the wifi card but was too huge and was very sluggish on the laptop.
SparkyLinux however has no problem recognizing the wifi card and it was a very easy to make it run from a live usb stick.
So I decided to install SparkyLinux on all three and I formatted the internal harddrive with a root partition labelled "/" sized 16 gigs and  a linux swap partition of 4,5 gig and the remainder of the 80 gig disk as another primary partition marked /home and then I tried to install.
Everything seems to go fine during the install process and having filled in language and so on it starts to copy files to the hard drive, and then somewhere between 20% in and 90 % in it just freezes up and does nothing, the same thing goes for all three laptops. I must have tried 20 twenty times but no joy.
Suggestions would be very welcome :-)
Rolf

[Dai_trying]

One thing I can think of would be if there were some settings in bios that are preventing something working correctly, I would try a reset to defaults of bios settings and see if that works.

[Rolf]

Thank you I'll try that at once :-)

[Rolf]

Unfortunately it didn't work :-(

[paxmark1]

Does dropping into a tty help?

[pavroo]

Try to install again and run the installer from a terminal emulator:

Code Select Expand

sudo live-installer
and have a look what is the latest issue.
There should be a log stored in /var/log/live-installer.log too.

Otherwise, you can try the older installer called Sparky Advanced Installer too.
It also stores its log in /var/log/ so it should help.

[Dai_trying]

If you are using the laptop without another OS (windows) then I would recommend wiping all partitions and let the installer create the complete set-up for you, it could be that the partitions may not be set-up correctly (interpreted by the installer).
And due to the age of these machines I am guessing that they do not use UEFI and have no option in the bios for "secure boot".

[Rolf]

thanks for good answers. I only plan to use SparkyLinux (no windows) I wipe the harddrive before I attempt to install. And I set them up the way I like it with 18 gigs for root primary partition ext4, 4,5 gigs for linuxswap and then the rest for /home primary ext4 ca 53gigs.
I tried to install the SparkyLinux 4.4 LXDE x86_64 at least 20 times, no joy, I also tried Mate version and the LXQt version still no joy. BUT the good news I managed to install the XFCE version at the third attempt :-) Now I'm going to try to install the Sparky's XFCE version on the two other laptops.
Thanks a lot guys for friendly advice :-)
Rolf