Hello,
I installed antix 8.5 to the hard drive of an acer Travelmate 240 with 2 gb of ram, and had it up and running with wireless and touch pad for a couple of days. I was delighted with the performance. Then I messed around with smxi. I *think* it was an attempt to upgrade the distribution that broke the system, I am not sure, but something failed, and the computer would not boot from the hard drive. It is still booting just fine with the live cd. I reformatted the hard drive with gparted, and reinstalled from the original CD, several times. The 'puter would not boot other than to cd. I burned another cd. No joy.

I used 'wipe' to (hopefully) do a low level format of the entire drive, because something had given me the idea this might help. It did not. I used gparted to write ext3 file system, reinstalled, and no joy.

I have fiddled about with grub...using instructions from the net, but no joy. The hard drive mounts and the directories show up in the terminal, and everything looks like it is there from file manager, also. When I go to 'grub' in the terminal, setting root, kernel are fine, but the command:
initrd /boot/initrd yields 'no such file', yet initrd is present in /boot.

I have gone to the mepis system assistant and done 'repair system boot', installing grub on the root partition, using 'update boot menu', 'use initrd', and all combinations of these. No joy.

The hard disk has three partitions, hda1 /root, hda2 /home, hda3 /swap. I notice a lot of talk about 'menu.lst' but I do not have one. I created one and used someone's 'original' from their cd, no joy. I edited it to the way I thought it should be...nothing. Without the cd, the computer goes through post, then there is a flashing hyphen up in the upper left hand corner of the screen, and the keyboard does not work. I have to use the switch to shut down the computer.

I'm green at this....but can follow directions, and will really appreciate any help. I'd love to get this up and running again. *S*


S.

If antiX will not install to hard drive I guess there is a problem with the hard drive itself and in particular the MBR.
Is any distro able to install and run? If it is, then you could install antiX afterwards as the partitions and MBR will now be 'fixed'

But first, try this:
Use the MEPIS assistant in live again and install to MBR rather than root.

Thank you for the help, anticap'. I had also tried that, and just did again.

The mepis assistant reports that 'grub installed ok'. On reboot w/o live cd the error message reads:

Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)

I will try installing another distro, and then anitx, next. Thank you again.


S.

Kinda ran into a situation like this running smxi for liqourix and aptosid kernel upgrades on my EEEPC 701SD. I narrowed down the problem to the update-grub command that smxi or even debian update-grub command in terminal.

This command would label when it should say AntiX is the only distro on the internal drive on this netbook. Don't know why update-grub command does this. Just glad I figured it out. Also found that aptosid kernel 2.6.36 did not play well with this Netbook. It would boot up. But got 5 to 6 lines of udev errors boot messages and cpu temp readout (acpitemp) would quit working in Conky also.

smxi I guess uses commands for grub-pc which doesn't use zero for the first drive anymore but uses one.
Or maybe I'm mistaken and it doesn't use zero for the first partition.

Thank you for the replies. I did as anticapitalista recommended, and tried to install other op. systems. Knoppix and Mepis refused with various errors. I ran the system and recovery disks from Acer. Knoppix and Mepis refused to install on the 'recovered' disk, so I tried winXP. It installed and displayed the splash screen then blue screen with assorted deadly sounding errors. As a last ditch I removed the two 1000 gig ram cards and reinstalled an old 256. The computer then cheerfully agreed to install antix, and antix booted obediently from the hard drive. Then I went through the process of mixing and matching the two larger ram cards. Now everything is working...but I do not really know why! Maybe the ram slots were dirty?

Rok...I did not find that grub had mislabelled the root in my situation, though I think smxi installation of liquorix did flash by during this process......I checked this several times, and it seemed to be always correct. I have never really had trouble installing linux of any flavour before, and had thought that it could pretty much handle any operator error, so, thinking I could just reinstall if necessary I let smxo do it's thing. My picture of it all is somewhat incomplete, obviously.

Perhaps this had something to do with my zeroing out the acer hidden partition? Hopefully I will not be so zealous in my pursuit of problems, in the future!

Many thanks.

S.