Hello,
I'm tired of windows... there's got to be a better way...

I have an IBM Thinkpad that is about 5 years old. I basically use this laptop for email and surfing, It was running XP and my hard disk crashed.
I bought a new hard drive and plugged it in... so far so good.
I put the simplymepis 3.3 cd in the drive and booted from cd.
After getting icons on the desktop,
- I selected "Install Me" (the obvious choice)
- then "autoinstall using entire disk"
... everything was going great... until

At 34% installed the instalation seem to stall, after 15-20 minutes the screen went blank and I could not get it to come back on. I eventually had to power off by holding the power button.

Now when I turn the computer back on I can get to the desktop by booting from cd only (as expected) but I can not select any icons on the desktop. I can move the cusor over all icons but none of them will allow to be selected. Same goes for all the icons in the system tray.
I tried to boot from hard disk just for grins and as expected nothing happens.

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.

David T

Mepis 3.3 is pretty old I would suggest getting Mepis 7 which is the newest version which might work better

SimplyMEPIS 3.3.what? -- There were several SimplyMEPIS 3.3.x releases. For instance, I'm still using 3.3.2 on my old desktop as I transition to 6.0 (not 7.0) on my newer desktop.

I won't use 7.0 for now because it locks up using Kuickshow or viewing movies. Of course, this could be some issue w/ my "new" h/w (it's old & a bit strange), but I am much happier w/ the way 6.0 works on it.

Did you verify the CD after you burned it?
Do you know how to wipe the HD, or part of it, using dd in a terminal?

I use to have problems installing Mepis 3.x. Sometimes had to try the install 3 times before it actually made it through 100%. I also may have added nodma to the boot options when booting the live cd.

archtoad6 wrote -
- Did you verify the CD after you burned it?
- Do you know how to wipe the HD, or part of it, using dd in a terminal?

The CD with 3.3 on it, I got from someone on ebay a few years ago and it was tucked away in my "misc" computer spare stuff. I found it while looking for something else.
My thinkpad had been at the bottom of the closet for a couple of months... after finding the 3.3 cd I decided to buy a hard drive and give it go...

I downloaded 7.0 as an ISO (what ever that is)and used Nero to burn a cd at 4x with the verify option on, and it failed. For some reason it does not seem to be converting images to files. I use Nero to make DVD's and I've never had a problem with it converting images to files while burning dvd's...
I did the same with ubuntu, and had the same results.

Wipe the hard drive? Maybe with a soft cloth and alcohol... just kidding... not sure... have not done that intentionally before. Should I do that and try again / can that form the BIOS?... because that's as far as my computer will go...

Don't know what "using dd in a terminal" means... sorry, I'm use to buying new computers and burying the old ones instead resurrecting them. I want to try to brake away from the "windows crutch". So I'm hoping to learn more about Linux. I am an MRI Tech and our GE scanners have switched from Windows base to Linux RedHat.

wificraig
> have you had any problems with your wireless connection using 3.3?
Some of the stuff I read online seems to think that ubuntu is easier, have you tried it before?

Thanks to everyone for responding to my questions. Sorry I was slow to respond but we are in the process of selling our house and trying to make decision on which house to make a bid on ...

It's been a long time since I used 3.3 (or 3.x?). I used it on a Toshiba laptop with Atheros wireless card. If I can recall correctly, the old 3.x Mepis had a script in the KDE Control Center under System Administration, and there was a Mepis selection which allowed me to configure the wireless connection. The 7.0 Mepis does it in a much nicer GUI from the KDE Menu. But the nice thing about Mepis, is that I could always get the interface working even from the live CD. Alot of other distros you have to download the drivers and use ndiswrapper, which is very time consuming unless the distro is installed to hard drive.
To tell you the truth, though, I've started using a distro called Pardus which uses the KDE desktop (and is a Debian distro like Mepis), and has it's own wireless script (when I used an older Pardus, the script looked very familar to the old Kanotix script, so it's probably re-written from that), and it works very well from the live CD as well. The only problem is that with Pardus, the ISOs are separate, so if you download the live CD, you can not install it. The Install CD won't work as a live CD.
As far as downloading ISOs, I've started using Bit Comet to download bit torrents. You can go to LinuxTracker.org and search for Pardus or Mepis. Once you download the bit torrent, you don't worry about md5sums and Nero should be able to burn an ISO for you. Just make sure you select ISO and not data CD from the Nero program. The only distros I recommend for new users any more is Pardus for someone interested in Debian, and Zenwalk for someone interested in Slackware. I know that with Red Hat, you might be interested in RPM distros, but I've never really enjoyed any of the Red Hat offshoots (or Suse, Fedora, and Mandrake/Mandriva for that matter), with maybe the exception of Scientific Linux.
You didn't mention if you tried to re-install Mepis. If you have a Barnes and Noble book store, sometimes a linux book or computer magazine will have a linux cd-rom included, and you won't have to download a CD. Also, osdisc.com sells the Pardus Install CD (as well as anything else out there) for $1.95.

I like the Barnes and Noble idea. I just so happen to have a gift card for that store.

I tried installing 3.3 several times, but would never make it to completion. Maybe something with my computer. When the installation stalls, i can't software to respond to commands, so I have to do a hard shutdown. next time I turn the computer on and try to boot from cd, it get stuck and keeps repeating an error (I didn't write down the code). If shut down and reboot from cd it will load again.
I have tried running the cd with DEMO and everthing seems to work.

I found the menu to access my wireless card, haven't been able to get it to connect yet, but I've only had limited time to mess with so far.

How about the touchpad on your laptop? I have to use the "little red Joy Stick" in the center of the keyboard... yuk!

Thanks for the great info

Sick'o'windows