I replaced the Mepis 6 partition with Mandriva One. The laptop is a dual boot with Win XP which I need to retain because of the accounting application I use for my small business. The problem was that the new naming scheme for hard drives has made a mess of what used to be a simple procedure for setting up dual boots using IDE drives.

The situation was further complicated because with the release of Mepis 7, Mepis has switched from using the Ubuntu repositories to the Debian repositories. This means that to move forward you have to do a re-install rather than an upgrade. I first downloaded the iso for Mepis 7 but the install process could only see sda as a whole rather than the Win XP partition and the linux partition.

Ubuntu 8.04 was a bit better [1]