How can I upgrade From 2.8 to 3.0

[gold_finger]

@RobGoss,

If you don't want to continue on with this, I understand and that's okay.  Since you once had LL 2.8 working on the machine, but can no longer seem to get either LL 3.0 or 2.8 installed to it, we're as anxious as you to figure out what is going wrong.  It is a bit baffling because you seem to be following correct procedures.

If the machine is able to boot into the live LL dvd and it seems to work while in the live environment, (eg. Menu, opening programs, browsing internet with Firefox, etc.), but fails to install properly, you may be right in thinking hard drive is dead/dying.  (If live environment doesn't work properly, then it could be something else causing the problem.)  If you feel the urge to continue on trying, there is something you could install and run in the live dvd to test the hard drive and see if that really is the problem.

Boot live dvd.  Open a terminal and enter following commands:

Code:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install smartmontools gsmartcontrol

When install is complete, close terminal and go to Menu -> System -> GSmartControl to open the program.

• Click-to-highlight your hard drive shown in the lower half of interface.
  
• Click "Device" (along top).
  
• If "Enable SMART" and "Enable Auto Offline Data Collection" do not already have a check mark next to them, enable those first.
  
• Then, select "Perform Tests"
  
• In following screen, select "Short Self-test" from the "Test type" menu and hit "Execute" button.
  
• After 2-3 minutes test will complete and you can see results by hitting "View Output".
  
• About 20 lines down from top of report you'll see a summary line like this:  SMART overall-health self-assesment test result:  PASSED  (or FAILED if disk is bad).
  
• There will be more details of results following that line, but to be honest I have no idea how to interpret them.  Mainly, we/you want to know if indeed the drive is failing or not -- which the summary quickly says.
  
• If FAILED, then we have our answer.
  

If the hard drive report shows PASSED, then not sure what problem could be.  Only other question I would have is what type of install did you try?  One where installer uses the whole disk, replacing what is on it and automatically setting partitions itself; or did you pick the "Something else" option where you manually set partitions yourself?