Recently, every time I have tried to install MEPIS from the liveCD, it has taken so long that I've invariably lost my patience and stopped the installation; except once, I let the installer keep going all night while I went to bed, and found it finished the next morning. It's not freezing; clicking Abort doesn't do anything, but I am able to abort by logging out. Does anyone have an idea why this is happening? This happened with a (presumably) professionall burned liveCD I bought online. By the way, my HD is 150 GB, Linux partition about 76 GB.

1. What's the rest of your hardware?
   
2. How are you creating your "Linux partition about 76 GB"?
   
3. Have you tried a smaller Linux partition.
   
4. Do you have the option of d/l-ing & burning your own CD?

I have done tens of SimplyMEPIS installs, both for myself & for others, & have never seen the problem you report. In my experience install times run from 12 to 25 min.

My last install took 4 minutes -- no lying. Download a new ISO and give it a 30Gb partition.

Pentium III, 866 MHz, 376 MB RAM. I normally use the partitioner included in the MEPIS installer (used to be Qtparted, I believe, but it seems to be different on the latest MEPIS) to create the partition, but used a Partition Magic CD this time.

D'oh. I just went through it again, and it was done within an hour. I apparently have wasted your time, good sirs. My apologies. I'll tell you why i thought (probably wrongly) that the installer was moving at a snail's pace. It wasn't the time that passed; it was that every time I tried this, the bar got stuck at 3%, installing or not, until I lost patience.

What did you do differently this time?

Nothing except let it run as long as it wanted.