A bit of a crisis and would greatly appreciate help! I have a Dell Inspiron 11 3158 (3000 series 2-in-1) laptop (500 MB hard disk, 8 GB RAM) that was working quite well except that it was a bit slow. The laptop is 8 years old. Since the RAM could not be upgraded further, I followed the advice of the Service Center and changed the hard disk to a new 1 TB SSD disk with no operating system preinstalled.
I have been trying to do a fresh install of Ubuntu Desktop versions but the installations simply hang as described below. [I had Ubuntu 22.04 on the earlier hard disk and if I plug the old one back now (as an external HDD) then the laptop continues to boot successfully into Ubuntu 22.04 and all my files are still evident.]
For the fresh install, I used the official ISOs for Ubuntu 22.04, 24.04 and 24.10, but they all hang at a similar point. I first verified the ISOs (checksums) and then used Startup Disk Creator to create a bootable USB disk to start the fresh installation.
Whether I start on 'Legacy' boot (which is how it was with the old hard disk) or UEFI boot in the BIOS, the installation runs a little and hangs at the line that reads:
/usr/sbin/plymouthd(_start+0x25) [0x5c9ece2c0fc5]as in the screenshot below.
I have tried installation with 'Safe Graphics' or by removing quiet splash or changing that to nomodeset as suggested in some other cases, but none of these worked.
Other system details:
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-6100U CPU @ 2.30 GHZ64-Bit Technology: Yes (Intel EM64T)
I would greatly appreciate pointers on how to get past this bug/installation problem and get Ubuntu 22.04 (at least) back on the new hard disk. Also should I boot 'Legacy' or 'UEFI'?