Centos does not boot after install

[darighteous1]

Hi guys,
I am trying to install Centos on my old laptop (Lenovo T410). It was running Windows 7. Here's what I did:
- merged partitions (right before the start of the installation I had 1 300GB partition)
- downloaded the latest .iso from the official site (CentOS-7-x86_64-Minimal-1804.iso)
- burned the .iso to my flash drive, rebooted and selected to boot from the flash
- on the configuration step of the installation process, I clicked on manual partitioning and within I selected the "do it for me" option (don't remember the exact name); that created root, boot and home partitions; I adjusted the root size a bit (it was 50GB, I made it 20)
- after the installation was complete, clicked reboot and after the initial screen where I can enter the BIOS, I just got black screen with a _ in the top left corner and that's it
- I waited for several minutes, nothing happened, I couldn't enter any input
- Tried to re-install and this time added a BIOS boot partition of 1MB, because I read somewhere that this might be the problem. Nothing changed

Any ideas? I'm new to linux and there is not much info on migrating from windows to linux. Most of the stuff I find is for installing linux on dual boot, virtual machines or changing the distro from one to another. Thanks a ton!

[TrevorH]

- burned the .iso to my flash drive, rebooted and selected to boot from the flash

How? unetbootin for example is broken and corrupts the CentOS iso images while copying them. Information on USB key based installs can be found at http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/InstallFromUSBkey

[darighteous1]

I had read that same wiki link. First time I did it with unetbootin, but I couldn't start the installation process that way. From the boot menu, whenever I chose Install Centos (or anything else for that matter), the installer couldn't start for some reason (dracut initqueue timeout).
Then I read that I could burn the .iso to my flash drive using Win32 Disk Imager. I tried that and after reboot, the installation process started and finished without any problems. But then happened the black screen. Also, now my other computer can't detect my flash drive when I plug it in...

[darighteous1]

Ok, I managed to resolve the problem. I did another reinstall. This time I deleted all prtitions and set them again. There was one very small partition (about 1MB, but not the one I created). I think that had left from the windows. After deleting it and doing the install everything worked fine.