Comment 9 for bug 658680

I had the same problem with a home-built desktop with two drives, SATA and IDE (like cwsnyder, see above). Perhaps this description will help:

I received the following messages in this sequence after installing LMDE 64 201012 on a home-built PC with Biostar 790GA A2+ motherboard, AMD Phenom 9850 4-core, and 4 GB RAM:

[quote]Could not update .ICEauthority file /home/runbei/.ICEauthority[/quote]

[quote]There is a problem with the configuration server (/usr/lib/libgconf-2-4/gconf-sanity-check2 exited with status 256)[/quote]

[quote]The panel encountered a problem while loading "0AFIID:6x10ME_MintMenu". Do you want to delete the applet from your configuration?[/quote]

(Problem recurs on reboot whether I choose Delete or Don't Delete.)

[quote]Nautilus could not create the following required folders: /home/runbei/Desktop, /home/runbei/.nautilus. Please create these folders, or set permissions such that nautilus can create them.[/quote]

Obviously, there's no MintMenu or Desktop at install.

[Later:] I may have found another hint. When I try booting in recovery mood it doesn't recognize my home partition. The partitions I have are:

1. A Windows partition
2. An install of Mint Julia 64 with 2 primary partitions, swap temporarily absent, deleted and used to create...
3. An extended partition created to test the install of LMDE 64; it has 3 virtual partitions for /, swap, and home.

The home partition is /dev/sda7. On boot the following message appears:

[quote]Mounting local filesystems...mount: special device /dev/sda7 does not exist
failed[/quote]

Not sure the fact I'm using an extended partition + virtual partitions matters, as I get exactly the same errors when I install LMDE 64 to 3 primary partitions.

p.s. I wonder if part of the problem is that I have one SATA hard disk which I use for Windows and Linux installs, and an older PATA/IDE disk that I use for data. I've heard this can cause problems for Debian-based distros. ? I'm vaguely aware that in the past sometimes the sda and sdb designations seem to be reversed depending on what program is looking at the disk (gparted, installers, etc.).

Just for the heck of it, I'll replace the 64-bit install with 32-bit LMDE and see what happens. [Later:] Ah, so. The 32-bit installer doesn't let me choose the sdb disk for installation. So much for that.

[Later:] Just to include this in the record in case it helps the developers at the next LMDE go-round: I deleted the extended partition where LMDE 64 was installed. I then tried to install it in primary partitions, to see if LMDE could find my /home folder there. But I was unable to do that because the LMDE 64 installed couldn't see my SATA disk (sda) where I install operating systems. Funny, it was able to see the disk when I installed on an extended partition. Same error as LMDE 32, which also can't see that SATA disk.