I just tried to install MEPIS on a Thinkpad A31 laptop tonight, the laptop comes with Windows 2000 (and Silly IBM doesn't give you the windows installer CD's it's 'hidden' on the disk in it's own partition so I can't be as caveleer messing with this hard drive). I booted into MEPIS and resized the windows partition on hda1 (I only have one drive) 2GB smaller with GParted. I then added ext3 partitions and a SWAP partition in the 2GB of free space. I had to do it in extended space because (WINDOWS + / + /home + SWAP + IBM rescue = 5 which is more then hard limit of 4 logical drives) The problem is the MEPIS installer only has one choice for the ROOT it is forcing me to install over the first partition on hda1 which is where the windows install is!! The next two "/home" and SWAP drop down menus let me select the other ext3 partitions I created...

*On my other computer SuSE didn't try to protect me from myself it let me install Linux in the middle of the hard drive.

The issue might be related to the size of the partition. Can you post your partitions with size?

The size is like
15.5GB primary (FAT)
2.0GB extended partition
-750MB ext3
-750MB ext3
-500MB SWAP
1.1GB primary (IBM recovery)

Have you done a dual boot with MEPIS?

Yes I did on my friend's IBM notebook. 750MB does not seem to be enough for MEPIS. You know that liveCDs use compression to store around 2GB of data. I would recommend that you increase the "/" partition into 2GB.

IIRC, the SimplyMEPIS installer requires 3GB of disk.

My experience is that 4-5GB is much better. Plus swap of course. I think SimplyMEPIS recommends 1GB.

I haven't run W2k (or any other "Winders (tm)") for almost 2 yr., but my memory is that It doesn't need anything like 15GB of disk space. Surely you can carve another 3GB or so out of "C:".

You need at least 2.5 GB.

I just made a 3.5GB ext3 partition and it's running!! Thanks guys.