holy mother of dog..........i guess i'm retarded. : i remember getting used to Mepis and Linux as a NOOB back in Janurary of this year, but geeeeez, Mepis 6 is STILL a pain to install. i came home from work and have been trying to load Mepsis for 6 hours now. i can't even get to a login screen. And i have a known good image cause i loaded it at work and there was no problem there.

i even went into Partition Magic in windows and did a delete and SECURE erase of all partitions and data. no residual at all from the older Mepsis Ver 3.4.3.

So i booted back into my Live CD to load Mepis onto my SATA drive (no dual boot here). I Qparted and made my three partitions AGAIN! root,swap, and home. i chose sda for my install and sda for my MBR. so i get through loading and do the reboot thing.

Mepis comes up to a dark screen with this info:

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root(hd1,0)
filesystem type unknown,partition type 0x7
kernel /boot/vm linuz-2.6.15-26-386 root=/dev/sda1 name quiet vga=791
Error 17:Cannot mount selected partition
Press any key to continue...
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ok, so i press and i get the same choice to start up Mepis which i get the same message over and over.

Man, does anybody have a clue as to what's up here? what command i can use to "kick start" this puppy?

Did i say i have been sitting here for 6 hours and-----ohh never mind. good night Irene, i'm wasted.....

thx for the halp yall........

Mmmmm - you sure about the disk you are hitting ???. That says a NTFS partition.

When I installed it I used the program that comes on the MEPIS6 disk, Qparted? I think its called. I formatted a couple of partitions and it didnt work, it formatted alright but it couldnt set the filesystem type properly. It took me a couple of goes before it recognised it. It oculd be a bug in the installer because this sort of thing has never happened to me before.
Im loving mepis now though, its the best distro Ive ever used.

Try not using Qparted and let MEPIS install the default size partitions (use entire drive). You will get root(hda1) swap(hda2) and home (hda3). Then you can use the live disk to resize if you don't like the default sizes of your partitions. You don't have to "delete" old partitions. The install from MEPIS 6.0 live takes care of that. Keep it simple on the initial install. If this dosen't work you may have a bad CD. Reburn at the slowest speed your CD will work at (probably 4-8).

ok, i slept since then..... yes that---- root(hd1,o)---- does look very suspicious. i re-loaded Mepis to my Sata drive(again, i'm using seperate hard drives) with the windows drive totally unplugged. i thought this version would be more up to date and "more" automatic in it's install. so far, not the case....

sooooo, you think it's looking for my Windows drive eh?

so your saying let it use (hda1)2 & 3? i think i did it that way at work and it worked. then again, i was not using a Sata drive their either. ok, and i'll try another image to. i'll try anything right now....thanks.

BTW Frank, i just noticed your from the White Mountains. We were at Sho-low last November visiting with my GF's buddies. We are looking around trying to get a piece of land there. very nice area....

I just noticed you're from Houston. I retired last year from the Houston area (Humble, TX). That's a coincidence! A SATA drive shouldn't make any difference. The designations (hda1, hda2 and hda3) are just partitions. hda1 is root, hda2 is the swap file and hda3 is your home directory.

yea weird, i live in West Houston near hwy6 and westheimer. Nice to meet ya Frank. our friends actually live in Taylor but we tooled around in Sho-low.

Below was my path to a fix from the Mepis lovers forum: i was actually(hd0,0) "not" (hd1,0) like my MBR was pointing to.
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Check your root (hdx,x) settings in grub.
When you get the error hit ESC, then c to get a grub command line then type
find /boot/grub/stage1
It should tell you your correct root settings (probably (hd0,0) )
Then ESC and e to edit your menu.lst and boot up.
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i am finally in and loveing version 6. Thunderbird and Firefox perform very well now. I still gotta get News videos to play in FF. they want the Windows plugin. and still gotta figure out the update on synaptic. AND i gotta figure out how to make my Nvidia drivers work so i can THEN install my Unreal and Quake games to play. other than that, not bad for the first day. Mepis rocks.

Stay in touch Frank, maybe we'll cross paths later....

well heck, it won't take me to the blue screen. i have to choose (hd0,0) and go through this boot up process everytime i logon to Mepis...hmmmmm, got another lil project to fix....

That dynamic update is only for the life of the boot - make the same change in /boot/grub/menu.lst.

Also, what happens when you try and boot Windows ???. More work to do yet I suspect.

ahh thanks, will change it when i get home. and yea,---windows won't boot to the point of going to chkdsk and freezing after a 2 count......! I booted into safe mode same freezeup. a little puzzling since i'm going into the Bios and switching out harddrives. Windows on the IDE and Mepis on the Sata.