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The current state of my computer, after all of my tweaking, experimenting and attempts to fix my Ubuntu installation problem, is that I have Windows 10 installed on my HP Pavilion laptop on a 500GB partition. The rest of it is partitioned as unassigned in EXT4 format.
My problem started when I was trying to do some development on a fully Ubuntu system (no Windows). Ubuntu was running fine, and I was developing and playing around with OpenCV (Python) code. For some reason, OpenCV was unable to open video files (it could stream the webcam just fine). I looked online and determined that what I should do is re-install OpenCV with FFMPEG enabled. Well, that's when my problems started.
I couldn't figure out how to just update OpenCV, and I wasn't confident or sure how to remake it, so I decided to just totally remove it and re-install it with anaconda since I had read it would solve the FFMPEG problem. I tried using different ways to uninstall, including pip, etc., but what I ended up doing (I know, I know, bad idea) was using a device wide rm command looking for anything with "opencv" in the title. After that, Ubuntu kept occasionally giving me errors, and OpenCV didn't seem to work correctly after installing it.
So from there, I decided 'forget it, I'm just going to start from scratch', wipe my system, and reinstall Ubuntu, then reinstall OpenCV. I made myself a USB stick with Ubuntu-18.04 (which I was already running) and tried to install it. It kept freezing during the install, no matter which option I'd choose, from "do something else" to "erase Ubuntu and install". I think it tried so many times and got to different stages of installation that I corrupted something important, so I decided to seriously wipe it all.
I tried a separate memory repair tool that I downloaded onto a USB drive, and now I've tried installing Windows 10 (which did finally succeed, hooray!) and have tried modifying the partition tables and formatting them, etc. within Windows, but my Ubuntu install still freezes during installation. It usually freezes during the install itself, after all the selections have been made, or if I try to go in and edit the partitions inside the "something else" installation method. I've tried recreating my Ubuntu image on the USB, and I've also let it run for a good 18 hours just in case it was going slow, with no luck.
Have I just corrupted part of my memory beyond repair? Is there something wrong with the boot manager? Any help is appreciated.
Update: I performed Memtest86, and it succeeded with 4 passes after several hours discovering no errors. I also attempted to install a previous version of Ubuntu (16.04 LTS) with no luck. I am thinking maybe there is a problem with my partitioning possibly, because at one point I got an error stating (and I have seen it before) that "This computer has only 0 bytes disk space remaining". What exactly is it that I need to do, or partition that I need to increase, to fix this? And how? I have tried from within Windows with the partitioning tool, but I think that was making it worse.
Second update: Diskpart shows the disk has a GPT partition table and these partitions:
Partition ### Type Size Offset
------------- ----------- ------ ------
Partition 1 Recovery 499 MB 1024 KB
Partition 2 System 100 MB 500 MB
Partition 3 Reserved 16 MB 600 MB
Partition 4 Primary 473 GB 616 MB
Partition 5 Primary 100 MB 473 GB
Partition 6 Primary 9 GB 473 GB
Partition 7 Primary 2000 MB 483 GB
Partition 8 Primary 445 GB 485 GB
Third update: I’ve attached some images of errors I am receiving. The first and smaller image is of a very quick error that is thrown on the screen and then goes away whenever I start up either the Ubuntu install or just “try Ubuntu”. The second and larger image happens spontaneously during either "Install Ubuntu" or “try Ubuntu” and just stays in a loop of printing that to the screen until I hard power off.
2Memory errors are usually hardware related and not repairable. What "memory repair tool" did you use? – music2myear – 2019-03-05T22:19:02.573
@music2myear I'm pretty sure I used Boot Repair Live CD and I found it here.
– ConcernedHobbit – 2019-03-05T22:57:29.700That would likely be an application for finding memory problems, not for repairing them. Your problem description indicates to me you very likely have problems with your memory, and @K7AAY's suggestion is one you should follow. – music2myear – 2019-03-05T22:58:43.323
1@K7AAY I performed Memtest86 - Please see the update to my question. – ConcernedHobbit – 2019-03-07T15:42:09.507
1@K7AAY - I just updated the post with the image. I know I have a lot of partitions, because I was trying to create partitions for Ubuntu to use, but I'm afraid it's trying to maybe boot into one that is so small it won't work maybe. – ConcernedHobbit – 2019-03-08T03:14:18.283