I'm gonna ask this here in "General" because I can't tell if it's the HDD or if it's a bootloader problem.

Basically, I've got a 120GB Western Digital, SATA 150 drive. I've tried MEPIS 7 and 8 beta3 and Linux Mint 5 KDE with the same outcome: the distro will install without errors, I am given the bootloader menu, then I get something like this:
Sometimes I'll get slight variations on this (I've tried several installs) like Error 17: mount point something or other.
I've tried setting up the partitions myself, letting the installer auto install, ext2, ext3, Grub at MBR, Grub at root, etc. Every time it seems I get a successful install but then no boot. I'm fairly certain the drive is good. It had XP on it for the last three years without problems.

here's my other specs if that helps:

mobo ASUS P4P800 SE
proc P4 2.4 Northwood
video ATI x1600 AGP
mem 4 modules, Corsair DDR 400 256MB
HDD's
40GB Hitatchi Deathstar, IDE runs MEPIS 8 beta3 without trouble
10GB Fujitsu IDE POS used for swapping files between Linux and Windows
120GB Western Digital SATA 150. (The drive in question) Worked fine for XP
320GB Seagate Barricuda SATA current home of XP

Any ideas very much appreciated.

From the code you have given, it seems the root partition is FAT. Not sure if that is possible. If it is, then since FAT uses "\" rather than "/", could that explain the phenomenon?

But I had GParted completely format the drive then repartition, not just once but several times. Could this be a bug in the GParted that ships with MEPIS? And the Mint DVD seemed to recognize the ext3 and swap partitions that MEPIS created.
Could it be a bootsector virus or something?

Have you tried allowing the installer to setup the filesystem on the installation partition? Or are you just telling it to accept what you've done, as-is?

Nah.

The most probably cause is that it's booting from the wrong device.

This can happen sometimes when you have IDE drives and SATA drives. A distro using the old IDE drivers will name the drives as hdX, and a kernel using the newer PATA drivers, based on the SATA infrastructure, will name them as sdX, that can change the names, and hence it will also change the ordering of the drives often, causing odd problems like the one you describe.

Just to make sure, use the grub facilities at boot time to edit the boot lines. Wherever you can see "sdc", go to that place, delete the "c", and then press TAB to autocomplete, and see the available options. If nothing happens, try to delete "sdc" altogether and trying to autocomplete "hd" instead. It's a feature of grub that can be very convenient in these cases. Try to find the right root.

If that's not the problem then we can look elsewhere, but first, let's try the obvious things, just in case.

Seems you're (and grub) not looking at the disk you think you are. This can be caused by bad init scripts when you have a mix of P-ATA (IDE) and S-ATA drives. I've seen it on Ubuntu, but apparently it goes all the way back to the Debian base - Mepis (these days) and Mint both derive from Ubuntu.

Try something completely different - say Fedora.

Oh crap I fixed it. Aside from the main BIOS page that shows all my IDE devices, there is the boot order page with a tab called hard disk drives. You can change the order of the drives while having nothing to do with the boot order. So while Gparted calls mine the third drive and GRUB was told by the installer it was the third drive, the BIOS says it was drive four.

Well thanks all the same. Your suggestions got me looking at it from a different perspective and that's how I found it. Mark this one down as solved.