Hello everyone! I'm new around here and to linux.

Attempted a dual boot option.

The installation(mandrake 10.1 community) went well on a partition of about 17gb. I used up this partition to make the root(5gb), swap(1gb) and home(11gb).

The problem: After installation everytime i attempt to startup linux from the boot menu(lilo) after a few checks of files in verbose mode i can see that it halts and completely hangs at this particular point "CHECKING ROOT FILESYSTEM". nothing except for a soft reset works.

tried rescue provided on the dvd...still the same.

Failsafe also has the same problem.

i'm using lilo boot loader

i'm using "linux swap" for the swap partition

i'm using ext3 on the rest of the partitions

winxp continues to load without any problem


Please help me out as this is quite disappointing as i was really looking forward to seeing things work today!!

How's your hard drive connected (SATA?)? As something to try add noapic to the kernel command line at boot (press ESC in lilo and TAB to see the options) as this has helped in a number of cases with me.

hello thankyou for the help. I installed Suse on my machine after i had waited long enough without any help!! I will certainly keep this in mind when i ever install mandrake again! thank you once again.