So I'll put this topic here because "The Lounge" isn't where it should go.
Recently I've been trying to get any sort of distro installed on my desktop (I have Mint running on my Laptop right now).
So far I've tried Manjaro (I spent at least a few days just trying to get it installed correctly, and then had issues with audio over hdmi, the display drivers themselves, and a few other issues) which installed but would only boot occasionally, I couldn't figure out why this was happening, so I'm on to trying Mint.
Right now I have Mint installed and when I try to boot I get a blinking line/cursor in the upper left of the screen and it just stays there. I have Secureboot disabled and everything, so I'm not sure what the problem is. I set-up an EFI boot partition, a swap partition, a root partition, and a home partition when I installed. So hypothetically it should have gotten everything right.
I suppose I should try and chroot into the drive from USB and see if the EFI is set-up correctly, but I had to give up because I have midterms coming up this week and I needed to study for them. So my question is, do you think that would be the best approach to seeing if something is wrong? Or is there another issue that is painfully obvious but I have no clue exists?
Any help would be much obliged, I want to try out the "What if I want everything" post by Zoltan, but the only way that'll happen is if I can get the dammned thing to boot in the first place.
Oh, I should mention that while doing this I unplug the hard drive that I windows installed on currently. I figure that if I want to make sure its not the one booting, I might as well remove it during the process. So as far as I know there shouldn't be any behind the scenes shit from MS that is screwing this up.
edit: I failed to mention my harddrive set-up. I'm trying to install this to a 120gb SSD that I just purchased. I have Windows currently on a 1tb HDD and I have a blank 500gb HDD that I'm still figuring out what I want to do with. When installing Mint I only have the 500gb and 120gb connected to the motherboard.