If the installation still freezes in the same spot or close to the same spot, go to the distribution's support pages. These pages may talk about some known problems and solutions that can help you and should show you how to join discussion lists in order to get more assistance. Otherwise, diagnosing the problem can be tricky and may seem more like voodoo than science.
Here are some troubleshooting tips:
- If this problem happens repeatedly at exactly the same spot, you may have a bad installation disk. Try the disk in another machine if possible and see if the installation fails in the same place there. If you purchased this disk with a Linux distribution, contact the distribution's technical support team. If you got the disk with a book, contact the publisher's technical support team. If you burned the disk yourself, try burning a new copy at a slower speed.
- If this problem happens repeatedly at exactly the same spot and you don't have a bad installation disk, the trouble may be with one of your machine's hardware components. If you can, try trading hardware between machines. If not, you may need to choose a different machine on which to install Linux or try another distribution.
- If the problem seems to happen randomly, your particular Linux distribution may not be compatible with that particular machine. Again, you can try trading some hardware around, installing Linux on another machine, or using another distribution.
If you're not sure whether your installer has frozen, try pressing various combinations of Alt+F#, where # corresponds to one of the function keys. Depending on the distribution, the installer has not completely frozen if you can see different screens when you try this technique.