MEPIS Community Forum

Recently my wife requested that I take an older Sony VAIO (PGC-GRZ610) and make it work for her to do a simple spreadsheet.

I took on the request and now wonder if it would have not bee easier to hire her an accountant.

It was running XP and had a 256 ram chip. The thing was constantly running 100% and was very slow to say the least. I ran the usual tests for problems. Nothing that I recognized came up.

I bought a couple a 512 chips and installed. Now the thing was using all the new ram also.

So I decide it was time for me to learn about MEPIS. I bought a cd and installed it the day it came. I am pretty sure I checked the box to wipe out the XP. Anyway the system was still running as slow as ever. Two days ago I returned to the pc and it would not boot up at all.

I the put the MEPIS disk in the cd drive and it hoped it would start up. Nope on that.

I started to read on how maybe there was a way to at least boot the it up and format the thing and then reload the MEPIS for another try.

This has brought me here.

So any help on how to boot it up would be much appreciated.

Fred King

What version of MEPIS? You say, CD, but the latest comes on a DVD.

I would download and burn a copy of the GParted Live CD, and boot to it and use it to wipe, repartition, and format the drive. Let us know if that's successful and we can go from there.

If you can't boot to that, then you have other problems.

edit

I looked, and the laptop looks to be very similar to mine.

I was only able to get mine to boot M11 with a USB created with UNetBootIn. I also had to use the PLoP boot disk to enable booting to USB. Sounds more complicated than it is.

Let us know if you need any assistance doing that.

The disk is a bootable DVD, entitled: "SimplyMEPIS-32 11.0.12"

I will take up your suggestions tonight.

Thank you,

Fred

Update 4:30 PM my time

Using your kick in the butt, so to speak, I was able to boot the thing.

I used a cd with "SystemRescueCd-x86-2.6.0" (366 MiB), made it bootable and started the pc.

After a bit came a line "could not find operating system". I took out the cd and did a ctl., alt. del. and MEPIS came up. I am now going to determine how to format the entire disk from MEPIS and then start over with a clean slate so to speak.

Thank you again for getting me off the dime on this.