Hey everyone, I used UNetbootin to make a bootable USB of Antix 8.2 (in windows xp). And received the following error:

Can't find MEPIS filesystem. sorry.
Dropping you to a (very limited) shell.
Press reset button to quit.

Also, I was booting this up on an eeepc 701 if that makes any difference. I know some people have got this OS working on the 900's.

There are no issues with the ISO file, as it has been checked and also run in virtual box. I am currently running eeebuntu 9.04 on my netbook, but would rather run this awesome OS. HELP PLEASE!

Just as a experiment you could try at grub boot screen the boot cheat code and change

boot=cdrom

to

boot=usb

I am not awake yet. So if bottom line says something other than boot= . Its because my head is still asleep.

I ran into a similar problem a couple of days ago. The key error message is the line just before the error message you posted. It tells you which device it got the /mepis/mepis squashfs file from.

What happens is that ALL hard drive partitions are scanned for the file /mepis/mepis and the first one found is the one that is used. I had an older /mepis/mepis installed on an unused partition on one of my hard drives and the existence of this file is what caused the usb boot to fail. The simplest solution might be to delete /mepis/mepis if it exists on one of your hard drive partitions.


========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"http://mepislovers.org/forums/showpost.php?p=192351&postcount=7"
linktext was:"This post"
====================================
by anticapitalista gives another way to get it to work that will ignore an existing /mepis/mepis file. That thread also contains the patch I made that allows you to create a persistent home directory on your usb key.

I never had much good luck with unetbootin (although others have). I ended up installing the Grub boot loader on the usb drive that was created by unetbootin. This is a little more work but gives you a lot more flexibility. Now I have a menu that let's me to select a variety of systems to boot into all on the same usb drive. Once you are able to boot into antiX, you might be able to use the /usr/local/bin/antix2usb.sh program to create a bootable usb key. It installs grub automatically which means that all you have to do is edit /boot/grub/menu.lst to add/change boot options.

Thanks for the comments. I don't have MEPIS installed on any partitions on the ssd. I have eeebuntu 3.0 installed currently. I do happen to have a MEPIS folder on the external USB stick though. Also, how do I mess around with the GRUB loader. I am fairly new to linux. Help!

You can configure the grub boot loader by editing the file /boot/grub/menu.lst on your boot device.

The first time I got my LiveUSB to boot was following anticapitalista's instructions that I linked to above. I put a copy of the iso in the root directory of the boot device and named it antix-8.2.iso. I put the vmlinuz file and the initrd.gz file (extracted from the iso) in the boot/antix directory of the boot device and then I put this section in my menu.list file: You will need to replace XXXXX with the actual UUID of the boot device (in my case it was /dev/sdc1). If you have another Linux system running, plug the usb device into it and then do: to show you all of the uuids of all the partitions. If you know that your usb is /dev/sdc then you can narrow it down with: Just to be clear, the above indicates that /dev/sdc2 has a uuid of 4EC7-54CD and /dev/sdc1 has a longer uuid that starts with 4b0 and ends with a48.

AFAIK, this is the easiest way to manually create a LiveUSB.

I think you may have to move (or remove) the /mepis/mepis in order to be able to boot from the iso image.

wow, thanks for the detailed response. I'll try this (though I will probably mess it up).

Oh yes. I almost forgot. You may need to use/run/install Grub in order to make the usb bootable with grub. I think UNetbootin uses syslinux, not Grub. You may need to run Grub from Linux on a LiveCD on your Windows box. The only tricky thing is that you can make your box unbootable if you screw up. Linux/Unix gives you enough rope to hang yourself and then a few feet more just to be sure.

Anyway, you need to figure out which device your usb is. It should show up as a scsi disk so the device name will be /dev/sd? where ? is a letter (sc = scsi disk). If the usb is mounted then the df command will show you the mount point every device is connected to which will let you figure out which one is the usb.

Just for kicks, assume your usb is /dev/sdc and the first partition is mounted at /mnt/sdc1. Then you will have to first copy the grub files into the first partition of the usb: Notes: Grub uses numbers instead of letters: a -> 0, b -> 1, c -> 2, and so on. Likewise partition labeling in Grub starts with 0 instead of 1.

I had you touch the barlow file because the find command in grub will list every partition that has that file in that location. Only one (hd?,?) should show up. Then you KNOW this is the right partition to use. In the example above, if your usb is /dev/sdc then the Grub name should be hd2 (because c -> 2) but the find command in Grub makes doubly sure. This is important because Grub lumps scsi and IDE drives all together so if you have both scsi (SATA) and non-scsi (IDE or PATA) hard drives then the simple correspondence will be broken and you will need the Grub find command to let you know which partition to use.

I know this sounds convoluted and bizarre. Think of installing Grub as the parallel parking of the Linux world. It is a little tricky at first but once you've done it half a dozen times it is a piece of cake as long as your are careful. And it is incredibly useful. It's like learning CPR for you computer.