Hello everyone, I have Mandrake 8.0 on G586IPC generic Mobo FCC # says DFI586IPC well all the same jumper & CPU specs. 8 Gig WD HD hda1 800MB with Boot Magic & Win 98se hda2 450MB Win 95 Garrentee 30 day until fatal errors hda3 200MB D:\> to save stuff when windoze crashes. hda the rest of Mandrake 8.0. Well what happend was this. I blew off all the cards & mobo with compressed air. I did only blow in the air holes of power supply. This was bad. After I started it up. I could hear it clicking lowdly. Like a relay or circut braker kicking in & out. Well anyway I did mess up the File Allocation Table of both Win 95 & 98. These both became OK after booting up in safe mode. I did remove pull cover off & clean P/S inside. Thick dust on circut board. Well that fixed the intermintant power problem. I have no ideal how to fix the kernel or how to fix the root file system. This mobo won't boot CD drive for rescue. Well I wouldn't know what to do if would anyway. I did try failsafe boot but the same error. I really want to learn the basics of Linux. And would like a tip on what to read to learn HOWTO fix this. As I am messing up things on a regular basis. That is why I went to Linux. I mess things up. It didn't mess it's self up. Win 95 is the worst O/S I ever had. Win 3.1 was good. 98se runs about 4 months before errors & lockups start. MD 7.2 doing great for over a yr. Until I did this. I went to 8.0 a couple month ago. I hate this non-Virtual screen in Windoze. & knowing I am in danger of losing this lenthy post before confirming it. Which HOWTO or part of manual should I read to fix this? Thanks Tom

Boot from a linux floppy and mount the root file system manually. fsck.ext2 will check your file system for errors. This is usually run by Linux after a bad shutdown anyway. Anybody know of any problems just running fsck? I've never actually done it.

You might want to get this root boot disk. It has lots of utilities for repairing broken machines: http://www.toms.net/rb fsck should repair your filesystem. I've never had to run it on any of my linux systems either. Linux checks the filesystems at startup automatically. But it runs fsck with one of the switches on so it won't prompt to repair anything. It only checks if there are errors. Mik

Thanks Mik, I did download & create a boot disk. It booted up great. fsck was not found. But there is a lot of things to try. A hole lot on this floppy disk. Thanks again. This looks like a great disk!! Tom

fsck is on the floppy boot utility. I didn't type the full command " fsck.ext2 ". And there is fsck.msdos also. But now I think it is a BIOS conflict. I should have posted the full message. Which is: ernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 03:064096)PORTS MULTIPORT SHARE_IR I am assuming that because the K is missing (off screen). That the Q might be missing on the IR. This O/S work fine until I plugged in a PCI 10/100 baseT network card. And in Win 95 it was using the same IRQ as (I think) my modem. I did remove the network card. But the same message apeared. I put the HD in another PC & it booted fine. (well check force did automatically run. But it seemed fine. I am lost. It's got to be the PC but Win 95 & 98 boot & run. Any advice would be apreciated. Tom

Motherboard manufactors have been using the 'shared slot' for awhile now. It seems that they like to share the Agp with slot 1 and 5 Try looking at your motherboards specs and see if you can tell what slots to use for what. Don't share:video,nic and sound. After you have those working great the put in modem. If you need modem more than nic then put it in first. Also look to see if you can assign the IRQ in bios. usually for VGA,MODEM, and USB only. By the way, if ya don't use USB,LPT1,COM2 or anything else disable it too. My sys has:Video,nic,sound, com1 and thats it, not even a floppy, Solaris gives me a warning msg but it goes away. Red Hat doesn't say a thing. FSCK works great, I use a 3 gig with bad sectors on my linux test box and it fixes it after I have running for two or more days. For some reason though it points everything to 'lost and found'? Good luck with linux

Thank You All, Once again it is my error that caused this. I changed HD cable & used bank 1 instead of 0. I found that after a re-install That it wanted to use hdc. Then I rebembered what I did. Well better me than Mandrake Linux 8.0. Sorry for all the trouble & thanks again. Tom