I need help with my partition table. This is my drama... My partitions were like this: A 11GB for the WinXP Pro (fat32), a 100GB for my data (fat32) and 100/2200/700 MB (ext3) for the redhat9 boot/main/swap respectly, on a 120GB HDD - the master one. A 60GB (fat32) on another HDD for backup. I decided to resize the swap partition (redhat chose it's size) giving the free space to the main (/) linux partition. I used Partition Magic 8 for that. After the operation, grub did work fine (was in the same partition that winXP) and windows loaded ok, but Partition Magic showed the whole master drive as "BAD" (error #108 - "Partition didn't end on cylinder boundary") while WinXP Disk Manager showed all partitions ok (ext3 unknown). Then, when trying to boot from linux I got this kernel panic: mkrootdev: label /1 not found mounting root filesystem mount: error 2 mounting ext3 pivotroot: pivot_root (/sysroot, /sysroot/initrd) failed: 2 umount /initrd/proc failed:2 kernel panic: no init found - try passing init= option I booted in rescue mode (redhat CD) and fdisk showed me all the partitions but the swap one (looked like the system didn't recognize any of the 3). So i went back to the WinXP's (everything is normal) disk manager and excluded the swap to recreate it. After that Grub didn't work anymore. Then i deleted and recreated it on redhat fdisk and Grub went ok again. Here is where i am... Can anybody help please??? I'm new to linux and i'm afraid to scrumble things even more... Thanks in advance. ** this site is great =) Filipe Knoedt

Its hard to tell from here, but I think Partition magic destroyed your ext3 partition/s. There are obviously many ways to check, but if you're new to unix-like systems and didn't have important data on the partition, just re-install redhat (or the latest Fedora Core from http://fedora.redhat.com) This time, either let redhat make the partitions, or choose the "expert" option and make a 400 MB swap, and a / (root) ext3 partition + any other filesystems you may want to have like /home, /usr, /usr/local etc. Having a seperate /home partition is a good idea since your data will be stored in /home/<user> so the next time you have to re-partition or change distros you can keep your data as it is... Email me if you have any questions, you can also read tons of documentation at http://www.tldp.org There are 10 kinds of people, those who count in binary and those who don't.

yes, i'll re-install redhat (when i have time). thanks for the response. Filipe Knoedt