Anonymous
I’d recommend you to do two things first, before attempting to install antiX.
1. BIOS & EFI/UEFI
There are basically three ways of booting:
BIOS (which might also be called *CSM or Legacy)
EFI/UEFI with Secure Boot –> this one should be disabled for installing antiX
EFI/UEFI w/o Secure Boot (== NO Secure Boot / Secure Boot disabled)
For antiX, you would try to install in BIOS/CSM mode.
*Compatibility Support Module
2. “invalid hard drive or drive access message”
Complete and exact message that you received would probably give us some clue on what is going on …
I doubt that there is a problem with a HDD/SSD or whatever you use, but however, I personally would never attempt an install on ‘HD health unknown’.
Unfortunately, there’s exactly one 100% reliable way to check disk and find/repair/mark the eventual bad sectors in such a way that every other OS can use that information.
That way is to completely delete the disk (save your data first!), formate it with NTFS and execute chkdsk under Windows.
This can be done only if you can take out the HDD/SSD and temporary put it in another Windows machine, connected directly to motherboard (NOT connected over USB; that might or might not work, depending on the controller/driver that USB case is using) or if you use the Hiren’s boot DVD.
Afterward, you can simply reformat it to anything you need … btrfs, ext4, xfs … just DON’T delete it and make new, but simply reformat.
Once you find out how to manage your BIOS/UEFI and find out in which state is your HDD/SSD, we could try to help you further.
I tried installing antiX using the MBR thing when asked where I wanted the boot loader.
You should install on internal HD.
Since you probably have one and only internal HD in an avarage laptop, it’ll be called sda.
sda is the whole drive and that’s where the boot loader has to be installed.
sda1, sda2, sda3 … sda + some number are the partitions.