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I am trying to install 12.04 on a logical partition. I have done this many times in the past, but for some reason I am now having problems. I was wondering if anyone might have a suggestion.

I currently have Vista and Ubuntu 12.04 installed on sda. Both work fine. I want to install a second Ubuntu on the same drive for testing and other purposes. The partition that I am trying to install over formerly had Linux Mint KDE, which also worked fine.

Now, however, the install seems to be going good until it hits the part in the progress bar where it says "Restoring previously installed packages..." and just sits there. The DVD stops and the hard drive light stops. This is my 3rd attempt. The first one stopped at the end with a message saying it could not mount the drive that the file system was installed on (sda8). The second and third try give the result I just mentioned. I tried to boot after each install and got just a black screen.

I was just wondering if the first failed attempt might be having an affect on the later attempts, like Ubuntu is trying to recover something?

I did not select the option to format the partition I am trying to install on. Would this help?

I could just format or delete this partition first too, I suppose.

I can't post fdisk -l because I am on the live disk and the Unity dock is not being displayed because I did not chose the "Try Ubuntu" option. I can post it after I reboot, it it will help. I am trying to put the file system on one logical partition, home on another, and swap on another.

I have also tested the disk at startup after the second failed attempt and Ubuntu said it was OK.

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are you using guided partitioning or manual? and, just a complete alternative: for pure testing purposes, virtual machines such as virtualbox or qemu-kvm work great and are much more flexible. They even have ready-made Ubuntu images for them. – steabert Aug 30 '12 at 5:59
This type of problem often caused by some other Ubuntu partition already there. Try formatting first attempted partition and do this again – Anwar Aug 30 '12 at 6:00
If there isn't some data that you don't want to lose I would always format the system partition on reinstall. Otherwise it can cause problems, especially if you install another Ubuntu version or even another Linux distribution. – stonedsquirrel Aug 30 '12 at 8:21
I am using manual. I've used VMs in the past, but I wanted a clean install with full system resources, so I decided on a second installation. I have just formatted the partition and am attempting another reinstallation. Hopefully this one will go better. – user86443 Aug 30 '12 at 23:51

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