LinuxQuestions.org - Im scratching my head over this

I was trying to get my numlock key to start up on mandrake 9.0 when the display manager started up so I edited the contents of a file in xdm(I don't remember which) Then I rebooted to try to get num lock to work. The computer worked fine several times then one time as I was logging out I got a segmentation error. The computer froze and I had to do a warm reboot. When the comp started back up I put mandrake cdrom into it and tried to reinstall. And that is where my problems begin. It made it through the first part ok up to where it formats the hard drive. I chose erase entire disk and it formats hda1 with no problems and it gets to hda 6 and just freezes. the caps lock and scroll lock on the keyboard start flashing. I tried it with another cdrom, another hard drive, another cdrom and hard drive at the same time. I tried using mandrake 9.1 and lycoris and red hat 7.0. All of them freeze when I partition. except red hat 7 which starts loading packages and freezes half way through with a signal 11. sometimes the mandrake will give me an error message saying ext2 error while formating hda6. On boot up when I am reading the kernel messages it says something about "ext2 runtime reached and I need to run ext2-fsck" How would I do that if I can't run anything? Also when I boot up the rescue mode and log into the terminal and type lsparts, It recognizes my partitions as being seperated but doesn't recognize anything but my swap partition. I have tried everthing I can think of and am still clueless.
Thanks
Chad