I have a sata drive used for storing music and videos formated with jfs that is somehow corrupted. I can boot the pc with the drive connected using a Slax CD but can not boot using my Slackware install with kernel 2.6.33.2. I can only boot Slackware with this sata drive disconnected

I want to try and recover the music and videos on this hd with jfsrec.

Is there a way to force the boot process with the cabling connected to this drive?

Do it with a live cd like system rescue cd

Or see if your problem is that your fstab is asking for a file system check on the drive at the wrong physical address. If so, try changing it to use a UUID= or LABEL= form or just change the boot-time check options (at the end of the device description line) to "0 0". Perhaps a noauto in the options field might also help, although the "noauto" is ignored when a fsck is implied by nonzero check option values. (You should be able to do this using the Slack CD.)

Thanks, I'm running photrec now from the old Slax CD. Photorec was not included on the CD so I compiled it in an empty partition on a another ide drive (hdb1) and so far one mp3 and one ISO recovered.

I had hoped to do this with slackware booted up so I could do something else while photrec did its stuff. Maybe I'll go read a book while I wait :^)

Thanks for the suggestion but the drive is not even listed in /etc/fstab. I could always mkdir somwhere and mount the dev later but the problem is that the system will not even get through a boot without a kernel panic. Something is seriously odd on that disk. I can not even run /sbin/lilo without errors when that sata drive is connected. I couldn't figure out what was wrong with my install of slack current 2 days ago. I was getting big EBDA errors and such at boot until I figured out it was this drive that was causing all the grief.

This is going to be a forever job as I'm only scannong for mp3's and ISO's this cycle since the bad drive is 230gb and the target recup drive is only 80 gb. Photorec says 6 hours plus and counting.

OK, here's another suggestion: One of my (older) systems failed this morning with a "kernel panic" during the boot (which was the first time it had been booted in several months). After a while, I figured out that the drive cable had failed (from age, I guess, since it wasn't being used). I replaced it with a spare, and I'm now using that system to send this note (while downloading updates to make the system current).