My MEPIS is working very well, but all three times I've installed it, it's had a very peculiar quirk regarding its ability to read the Windows partition. In Konqueror, if I try to access the Windows partition from /mnt, it opens the partition but always initially claims there is nothing there. "0 Files, 0 Folders." Uh...what?? A couple of times I've let it sit, and after ten-to-fifteen minutes, the files and folders belatedly appear.
However, I found an easy way to get around this, which makes it even stranger. If I avoid /mnt, and click on the floppy drive link on the desktop, I can view "4.7 GB Media" (this Linux partition) and "7.3 GB Media" (Windows partition). If I open the 7.3 GB media, MEPIS finds the files and folders partition without a problem.
I think this oddity is not indigenous to MEPIS. When I briefly tried Fedora Core in June (whatever the latest release was), something similar happened. But then, MEPIS is the only distro I'm interested in keeping that does this.

Oh, and if it matters, the Windows partition is FAT32. (I went to FAT the last time I had to reformat it, hoping Linux would write to it.) It's EMachines; Celeron; 600 MHz; 256 MB RAM; 10 GB HD.

At first I thought this might be a kernel problem. But I'm not sure. Do you have FAT and NTFS support built into your kernel?

To get at your windows partitions easily, open your home folder and click on the bright yellow star at the left. This opens an item Mepis calls 'services'. Listed here at the bottom of the items in the navigation panel on the left is an item called 'storage media' and in this are all your partitions including your windows partitions. You can then navigate to whatever file you wish. When you click on your windows partitions they will then be automatically mounted and you can then navigate to anywhere you want to go.

If you then go back to /mnt/hda1 (or /mnt/{your windows drive} you will find that now all the files will be listed. My windows partitions are all formatted as NTFS and I have no difficulty with this approach. My system, like yours, doesn't open anything when I navigate to the mnt/hda1 folder until I have mounted the drive properly using the above approach. I am sure there are other ways to do this - like using KwikDisk for example.

As well I understand it is ill advised to try and write anything to a windows partition from linux - I think that this has been discouraged because the Microsoft filing systems were all reverse engineered and writing to them may case subtle corruption of files and not so subtle corruption when you next try to access them from your windows partitions. Hope this helps.

Hey here is an easy work around. You dont need to go to mnt/*** to view your partition. Create a shortcut to media:/ using 'link to url' option in the 'create new' option in the desktop menu. Use it to handle your partitions . I don't know why the system menu was left in mepis which has link to storage media and home.

All I can say to that is: the kernel is in the same state as when I downloaded this distro from mepis.org; nothing has been added or removed. I don't know about NTFS support, but it must have FAT support, because it has been able to delete some files from my FAT32 Windows partition (). (I didn't know then that Linux should not write to the Windows partition anyway, as I saw someone else here say.)