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I have created 6 different USB sticks with different versions of Ubuntu and using different creator software (such as Unetbootin, Ubuntu's startup disk creator and others). In all cases the installer hangs on the Ubuntu logo splash screen. This is true whether I try to "try it" or "install it". If I hit ESC at that screen I see this message:

The disk contains an unclean file system (0, 1).
The file system wasn't safely closed on Windows. Fixing.

No matter how long I wait (e.g., overnight), it stays right there and does not proceed.

I do not care about Windows. I just want to install Linux.

In my testing I have tried versions of Ubuntu from 10.04 to 14.04.1. All have exactly the same issue so that lets me rule out any problem with either a specific usb stick or a version of Ubuntu. I made some of the USB sticks on different computers too.

MountainX
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2 Answers2

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I just got it working. I had an intuition that if I can somehow wipe my HDD clean ( removing the data including the file system ) I can get it working.

Googling ways to "nuke" my hard drive without Booting lead me to DBAN. You can make a bootable disk using this and then wipe your hard disk using the quick clean method.

There are tons of tutorials on how to use this, that you can refer to.

Another idea was to, use a pen drive ( of a big size maybe 32GB 64GB or 128GB ) as a hard disk and then install a fresh Ubuntu OS on it, and then mount the computer's HDD on it and run the fdisk commands or other disk checking commands to clean the file system.

Nuking the hard disk worked for me (Now I can try & install Ubuntu! No more clean your file system error) so I didn't try the second method, but that should work fine as well.

I am not a hardware or an operating system expert, so I might be using a few terms wrong. I hope you get the idea behind the solution.

ThunderBird
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Tushar Gupta
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Good news, it's most likely not the USB drives and nothing too serious either!

This happens because of an unclean shutdown on a Windows NTFS partition. The disk gets marked dirty and Ubuntu refuses to touch it so it just needs to be checked with either a quick boot and exit of Windows or with ntfs-3g and some utility programs in Ubuntu. (Catch-22)

Easiest way is to boot into Windows and let the disk check do its thing first then reboot into Ubuntu. If you really just want to nuke and pave your Windows install try using a GParted live CD and formatting the disk from there first.

http://gparted.org

vitz3
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  • The unclean shutdown is not on partition (0, 0), which is the Windows partition. It is on (0, 1). I do not know how to run checkdisk on that partition. I think it is the Windows recovery partition. Whatever it is, it seems inaccessible. – MountainX Feb 05 '15 at 17:21
  • furthermore, you are right about the Catch-22. I cannot get into Linux in any way, so I cannot run any of the tools I am familiar with. I hate Windows and this new Windows 8 makes me want to scream. – MountainX Feb 05 '15 at 17:22
  • Ok, then all you need is the disk to be formatted. Best option then is to nuke and pave with Gparted. See if that'll allow you to format the disk. I still find it a little odd you can't run Ubuntu via a live disk. :\ – vitz3 Feb 05 '15 at 17:25
  • "I still find it a little odd you can't run Ubuntu via a live disk." Me too!!! But I will proceed to make a GParted live USB next. Thank you. – MountainX Feb 05 '15 at 19:21
  • I used Gparted Live and deleted all partitions on the target HDD but I still get exactly the same error! So... what now? – MountainX Feb 06 '15 at 01:15