MEPIS Community Forum

The motto of Mepis is "It just works." I have never had any problems like these with ANY M$ OS.

I downed the Mepis 11.5 64-bit DVD, and installed it. I had the following partitions:

Drive #1:
My Windows XP SP3 C: Drive: NTFS (primary)
Unallocated space: 10.34 MB (logical)

Drive #2:
My D: drive: NTFS (primary)
Unallocated space: 15.49 GB
Swap partition: 3.73 GB, created for Remix_OS (logical)
Remix_OS partition: 13.97 GB (logical)

At this point, Remix_OS was working with a grub bootloader that could start it, or Windows. (I'd mention that I'd previously tried kubuntu, but I have a 11.05 disk and had a running installation, but updating the installation, as with a fresh install, only locked up, and produced a system that started to boot, but locked up in the booting process.)

I then installed Mepis to the unallocated 15.49 GB partition. I was disappointed that it was calling my "C" drive "/sdb". Remix_OS also got confused, and could not boot itself when I did a warm boot; but a cold boot started it normally. If I was happy to turn off my computer each time and never restart, Remix_OS worked well - having the ability to actually work with my Firewire audio interface using the Jack2 system and the firewire driver. It too is failing to do what every Windows operating system has done successfully, to my knowledge: consistently distinguish between drives. I was also disappointed that it allowed no ext2 choice, since for audio, a fast FS is ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL. I pressed on. After the install, I rebooted. I got a prompt "GRUB>". There was nothing else. Hitting <enter> had no effect. Hitting <Tab> had no effect. With no key I tried having any effect whatsoever, I used the Paragon Rescue Kit II to getting a booting Windows partition.

I tried the Super Grub2 disk to attempt to enumerate the operating systems, but it could detect neither Linux installation; and hence, start neither, which it claims to be able to do. I tried booting on the Live Mepis DVD, which has a handy utility to set up the OS to boot. Interestingly, when I verified that my "C" drive was /sdb, and told the utility to install grub, and rebooted. I still had the Windows bootloder on my MBR. Even the install grub utility failed me.

For me, I've got linux distros failing right and left. I can always reinstall Remix_OS, and am leaning heavily toward it, but a lot of ppl but a lot of stock in Mepis; and I want to be able to run KDEnlive. Remix_OS is XFCE based, and also is a Ubuntu-derivative. I'd like to try Mepis' rolling release strategy; but right now, I am most certainly not finding that "It just works."

My PCWizard vital statistics:
Mainboard : Asus M2N68-AM Plus
Chipset : Athlon64/Opteron/Sempron (K8 Family) HyperTransport Technology Configuration
Processor : AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ @ 2300 MHz
Physical Memory : 2048 MB (1 x 2048 DDR2-SDRAM )
Video Card : NVIDIA GeForce 7025 / NVIDIA nForce 630a
Hard Disk : ST3160215ACE (160 GB)
Hard Disk : WDC (320 GB)
DVD-Rom Drive : SONY DVD RW DRU-840A
Monitor Type : LG Electronics L1750S - 17 inches
Operating System : Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition 5.01.2600 Service Pack 3
DirectX : Version 9.0c (May 2010)

CodeLurker

It does for most.

If you would boot to the live disk and post the output from

that will help.

Also, post the contents of your MEPIS menu.lst file.

If these are your partitions after installing MEPIS, then your problem is obvious: You don't have a MEPIS partition. If these were your partitions before installing MEPIS, then please list your current partitions.

Also, I don't think you installed MEPIS 11.5 64-bit since that version hasn't been released yet.

By the way, Mepis does not use a rolling release model.

I booted to the Live DVD, and opened up Konsole. I ran the command. I got "Command not found" or its equivalent.



While I admit the wording at the top might have led to this impression, had you read a little further, you would have seen:



When I get in Minitool Partition Wizard, it says these partitions are unallocated; and it only shows the swap file.

When I get in Computer Management | Storage | Disk Management, I really get a treat:

It says my Remix_OS is healthy, at 13.97 GB, which I created as the last partition on my disk. Before this is 2048 GB, which it calls free space, which vastly exceeds the real size of my HD.
Before this is a healthy drive, at 3.73 GB, which must be my Linux swap partition.
All of these appear to be grouped together in an extended partition.

Before this is my supposed Mepis partition, at 15.49 GB; but it too indicates that it is unallocated. I will reboot again, and see if any linux partition managers recognize it.



Right you are. It was this torrent:

SimplyMEPIS-1.5G_11.0.12_64.iso



What a disappointment. Wiping out my setup and settings every 9 mos. sounds like something I don't much relish. I stand corrected. I'll reboot and see if I can see the supposed Mepis partition in either of the live disk DVD's.

EDIT:
OK. I booted in the Mepis Live Disk, which I'm in now. If I look at the KDE partition editor, it says /sda has no valid partition table. In fact, I have a "D" drive on this physical disk that is perfectly fine, in addition to the above mentioned conflicting reports of my partitions.

I noticed Konsole in the Live DVD does not seem to like sudo fdisk, as it keeps saying "Sorry, try again". If I go "su", it works fine. I then tried "fdisk -l", which gave me a gratifying

"Unable to seek on /dev/sda"

What is odd about this, is it saw the 15.49GB partition when it was unallocated, and appeared to install just fine. Now, I can't even reinstall it to the partition Mepis itself created! Actually, I used the partition tool on the install to format it to ext2, which turns out to be the KDE Partition Manager, only to be forced to make it ext3 by the Mepis installer. Evidently, the KDE Partition Manager or Mepis did something to the partition table which is incompatible with itself; but fortunately hasn't destroyed by "D" drive partition, which again, is NTFS.

EDIT:
I tried running gpartd on the Remix_OS live disk, and it too claimed the entire drive /sda was unallocated; which is indeed my "D" drive. I then rebooted into Windows, and have just now run a program on it to show that this indeed not the case.

You need to run the fdisk command as root.

Run fdisk again using su -c as shown below. It will first ask you for the root password which when running from LiveDVD is root. Also the -l is a dash and a lowercase L. Sometimes it almost looks like a numeral one.

I don't think



will accomplish anything that



wouldn't. Correct me if I am wrong. See my post preceding yours to see the result. I indeed understood that a "dash el" was intended.

Sorry, the first time I read your earlier post I didn't see thethe results from su -c won't be any different.

I think installing MEPIS directly on the unallocated space is where things went wrong. It seems that the partition table on your sda disk may have been corrupted. While in theory you can install MEPIS on unallocated space, the best approach is to make a partition using a partition manager (GParted is a very good tool for this) and then install MEPIS on that partition rather than have the installer make the partition on the fly.

I actually did that. I used the KDE partition tool first to create an ext2 file system, because it is reportedly faster for audio. I then chose that as the partition to install to. ext2 was not a choice for the installer, so I chose ext3, but it reformatted it. I can't remember if I chose a check-box to reformat it or not. I think I did.