I liked the Mepis 64 bit version and it seemed to run fine on my Acer Laptop. I had installed Sue10.2 to a external WD Passport drive and Suse would boot up fine from it. No dual boot, just have bios read USB drives for boot up ahead of internal hard drive. However Suse didn't recognize my wireless network like Mepis did without any tweaking. So I thought i would replace the Suse with Mepis and selected to install to the existing Partitions. It seemed to install OK but couldn't find any OS when booting up. I then selected option of install to whole hard disk with grub on root. This seemed to result in creation of new partitions but same result when booting up of no OS. I then tried another install with out grub again with same result.

Suse 10.2 and kubuntu on another identical external hard drive boot up fine from these external hard drives but I don't know how they do it. I think they just installed everything without asking me any questions after I said to use the whole hard drive. I would like to get Mepis to do the same thing. Any ideas of how to do this? What does a linux program need to boot up and where are these files or info located?

Grub uses a file called menu.lst This file contains the boot parameters and detected operating systems.

I found these files and compared them on both external hard drives and they look similar. One with Kubuntu boots up fine but Mepis keeps generating error 17 messages so I will try delete partitions and recreate them and re-install again and again to see if i get any better results.

Does any have Mepis booting off an external USB hard drive where the grub and boot are on the external hard drive? i am trying to boot up Mepis 64 bit 6.5 beta cause it runs real nice on my laptop.

I just installed 6.5 beta 7 last night on a internal hdd.
I tried a few times to uncheck the GRUB option and just use MBR.
When system rebooted I got a black screen with a flashing white cursor.

I reinstalled with GRUB and had several options on the menu and it boots fine now.

I too got Mepis to boot up fine from external hard drive but hard to manually edit the GRUB info to do so. The first time I got it to boot was from editing the command line to change the drive identification. I got helpful info on the needed changes on another forum, but now it boots fine. My MBR is also on the external hard drive and the bios reads the USB external hard drive first.

Check this link out. It is where I learned how to boot as many linux operating systems as I feel like and have it all bootable using grub.
http://www.justlinux.com/forum/showt...hreadid=147959

Right now I can boot to SimplyMEPIS 3.3.1-1, 3.4.3, 6.0, 6.5 beta 7, knoppix and debian as well as a spare 6.5 beta 7 that I am going to upgrade to edgy using this link.
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=526730
The post is by boemer. This way I can try anything that I want to 6.5 without wrecking my 'real' 6.5 beta as it is being built to the final using apt-notify and taking all of the recommended upgrades.

Just remember that when you are adding another linux be sure that it can install grub to root. Otherwise it may not work.