Bodhi clean install hangs on splash screen

Having some issues installing Bodhi onto a MacBook era 2008. Right now it's hung with the splash screen for the first boot. Only the other day this laptop ran Bodhi fine, but now I'm stuck in a loop of re-installing. (I tried Ubuntu yesterday, which was too much for this system, so am going back to Bodhi.) My concern is that interrupting the splash screen will again result in GRUB issues. To re-iterate, this laptop ran Bodhi fine just a few days ago. Hardware is : thufir@bot:~$ thufir@bot:~$ sudo lspci -vnn | grep -i net 02:00.0 Network controller : Broadcom Corporation BCM4321 802.11a/b/g/n [14e4:4328] (rev 03) 03:00.0 Ethernet controller : Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8058 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller [11ab:436a] (rev 13 ) Subsystem: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. Imac 8,1 Wired Ethernet Adapter [11ab:00ba] thufir@bot:~$ thufir@bot:~$ thufir@bot:~$ sudo lshw -C net *-network description: Network controller product: BCM4321 802.11a/b/g/n vendor: Broadcom Corporation physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:02:00.0 version: 03 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=b43-pci-bridge latency=0 resources: irq:16 memory:90500000-90503fff memory:90000000-900fffff *-network description: Ethernet interface product: 88E8058 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller vendor: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:03:00.0 logical name: ens5 version: 13 serial: 00:1f:5b:e9:5c:de size: 100Mbit/s capacity: 1Gbit/s width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm vpd msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list rom ethernet physical tp 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd 1000bt 1000bt-fd autonegotiation configuration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=sky2 driverversion=1.30 duplex=full ip=192.168.1.51 latency=0 link=yes multicast=yes port=twisted pair speed=100Mbit/s resources: irq:27 memory:90400000-90403fff ioport:5000(size=256) memory:90420000-9043ffff thufir@bot:~$ This laptop has now been hung for at least five minutes just booting Bodhi...somehwat randomly, command-d initiated a reboot to the same splash screen. interspersed with hard drive errors about flip done. But then, eventually, logs in... I don't know what's going on. Hard drive failure?