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Mepis does a spiffy job getting onto your system. If the CD works, the hard drive installation will work better. The above GUI installer walks you through a full install in 30 minutes or so, depending on the speed of your CDROM. The only problems I've had or heard of are BIOS and Windows related.

One older machine failed to boot due to BIOS problems. For some reason, I had selected a normal instead of LBA mode for the drive in the BIOS and Mepis' root partition had more cylinders than the BIOS could boot from. Setting the mode to LBA solved the problem.

NTFS, the new Windows default file system, presents special problems. There are three kinds of NTFS and Microsoft has patents on two of them that prevent anyone else from distributing software that write to them. Tools that resize Windows partitions might not work and Windows will be broken. If your computer came with an NTFS partition on it and you don't want to go through the pain of a Windows rebuild, you should get a separate hard drive for Mepis. As small as 4 gigs is plenty.

Both Lilo and Grub can be configured to Boot your old Windows or Linux install. Debian's installer, like most Linux distributions, puts a boot time menu onto your system so that you can chose what operating system you want to run. Debian's Woody did this excellently for my Wife's computer, so I suspect older Mepis would do as well. Mepis now uses GRUB, a very nice boot loader that can be configured by editing a text file. I have not tried dual booting with Windows because I don't run it on new systems.

This page showed me how to set grub so that I could dual boot Woody and Mepis. I used a different hard drive for Mepis and the install did not automatically make a menu option for Woody. It booted Mepis just fine but it was difficult to make it boot Woody from the second hard drive. I rescued Woody with the first Debian install CD and installed Grub there as the above site recommends. It was easy to then add Mepis' /boot/grub/menu.1st entries to Woody's and it all worked great from there.