Brickfrog

Funny enough I wasn’t too sure what this was about either, figured it was about Google’s AI or maybe it was a protocol for decentralized cryptocurrency blockchain tech. The Gemini cryptocurrency exchange has been around since 2014 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(cryptocurrency_exchange)).

There’s just too many things named Gemini.

You already tested with a standard Windows 10/11 install ISO? Put that on a bootable USB along with your exe but instead of installing you go into the recovery options and should see a way to get to the cmd prompt where you can test run that .exe. It might have the same results as Windows PE but it’s worth a try and downloading the Windows ISO is free anyway.

Worst case if you have a spare HDD/SSD you can put that into your system, temporarily install Windows 10/11 onto it (I don’t think you even need to worry about activation), run your .exe, then shutdown and swap your drives back to your normal setup and be done with it.

But yeah I get what you’re saying, ideally there’s a better way but I’m not too sure what else to suggest within Linux itself.

A little research got me to a “systemrescue” iso and that one worked fine. The live environment fired up and I was able to save all my data by mounting the partition via terminal into /mnt/mountfolder/.

Nice. I always keep an ISO of systemrescue on a bootable USB for these occasions, it’s gotten me out of jams in both Windows and Linux situations.

Not sure what to make of your issue with Ubuntu stopping from working, including the live boot, only for it to work again for you in the end. My hunch is wonky hardware but can’t really say.

Will be curious what solution you come up with. I tried to do this with my current Debian installation but never quite got it to boot off the RAID-1 array. In the end just went without RAID on the drive with Debian installed, maybe will re-attempt next time I do an OS install. I do have mdadm RAID-1 working normally for my data drives, just not the boot drive… you technically could just do that if you want to have your RAID-1 data drives separate from your OS boot drive.

Can’t comment on the Calameres installer but the regular Debian installer does detect RAID configurations from other mdadm setups. So you could either create your RAID-1 configuration in the shell during the Debian install or even create it in another Linux boot shell before jumping into the Debian installer. e.g. booting any live Linux with mdadm in it, configure the RAID-1 there, then boot into the Debian installer - the Debian installer will know there’s a prior RAID-1 on those disks and allow you to proceed with installing on the array if you wanted.

What tripped me up afterwards was trying to get it to boot off that RAID-1 afterwards, that part is not so straightforward. The link in the other comment does go into that so maybe it’ll helpful.

Some ideas for the future

Xrdp fail… plain and simple…

Xrdp usually works fine, you should try to find any specific error messages or logs. Xrdp also runs a service so you could also see if the service itself is running or what it’s status is (systemctl status xrdp).

For me Xrdp did fail when I initially tried to run it. I don’t remember the exact error being produced but there was something wrong with the port number xrdp wanted to use… in the end I had to stop the service, edit /etc/xrdp/xrdp.ini and set the port to a specific port number without using vsock. xrdp by default was set to use vsock ports which wasn’t working for for me.

Set up SSH on it and make sure you’re able to connect into it while it works normally, that way when the issue occurs you can do a quick test to see if the system itself is still up and running.

I’m not on Linux Mint / Cinnamon but I’ve occasionally seen GNOME sort of hang/freeze so the screen display becomes non-responsive. After a couple of times of that happening I ended up setting up SSH on the system and configured a SSH client on my phone so I can do a SSH connection into the desktop and force-logout my user (which apparently fixes the issue and brings my main desktop back to a normal login screen). I haven’t quite figured out if it’s Gnome issues or something to do with my Nvidia GPU… though with Linux if Nvidia is involved then it’s usually Nvidia, ugh.

Also if you’re physically at the computer when it happens try unplugging/replugging in the monitor cable, maybe there’s something wonky going on there or with the display connection.

Just some ideas to help you along :)

Do I need to run a virtual machine with win11?

Yes this definitely works fine. QEMU with Virt-Manager works well, you can set up as many versions of Windows as you like. Other people use VirtualBox, VMWare Workstation, etc. These all work well enough to run Windows + standard apps like MS Office or whatever you need.