hi guys

i tried making a Linux window shared swap partition using cfdisk and printed the result to the partition table and then immediately restarted my machine but the boot loader showed me there was an error it could not mount the boot partition, i use mepis what could be the problem? anyone, i would appreciate your help.

Well, if the boot manager gives an error, so obviously there is an error. Boot from some LiveCD and see what's going on. Try to format swap partition again.

What was the error given by the boot manager?? (Mepis uses grub as the boot manager btw).
When you boot from a live CD (I assume Mepis has the ability to boot as a live CD) post the output of:
This will list your partition table. Tell us if you can:
Which partition is your boot partition?
Which partition did you try to format with cfdisk to be a swap partition?

You may want to try a Super Grub Disc to boot Mepis. This can restore the grub boot loader also:
http://www.supergrubdisk.org/

hi guys

thanks for your contribution, I have another Linux installation fedora 10 which has the boot loader that tried to boot the mepis installation but it could not be mounted so what i did as tommcd said was to confirm the output off

fdisk -l

which part of is

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System

/dev/sda9 7184 7841 5285353+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda10 4989 6274 10329763+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda11 6275 6404 1044193+ b W95 FAT32

and i also confirmed the content of fstab for mepis

which part was

# Pluggable devices are handled by uDev, they are not in fstab
/dev/sda11 / auto defaults,noatime 1 1
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts mode=0622 0 0
/dev/sda9 swap swap sw,pri=1 0 0

but i realised that after i had deleted the Linux swap partition (/dev/sda13) to create a Linux - Window shared swap partition (fat32) all the partitions numbers changed i.e mepis went from /dev/sda11 to /dev/sda9 because i had deleted the original linux swap (/dev/sda13)

so when i used cfdisk to create the shared swap it dint edit the fstab for mepis whose static devices still read

/dev/sda11 / auto defaults,noatime 1 1, instead of /dev/sda9 / auto defaults,noatime 1 1

so i logged in as root in fedora and edited the mepis fstab to read the correct static partition device for mepis which is currently /dev/sda9 and it mounted properly. But i still wonder why cfdisk could not edit the entire fstab file with the current partitions after i had made some changes to the partition table?

Cfdisk (as you know) is a tool for creating, deleting, or modifying linux partitions. It does not do anything with fstab, grub's menu.lst or any other configuration file.
The situation you experienced is normal. If you have, for example, partitions /dev/sda1 to /dev/sda7, and lets say you delete /dev/sda5, then /dev/sda6 now becomes /dev/sda5, and /dev/sda7 becomes /dev/sda6. It is up to you to edit fstab, grub, or any other configuration files if you need to.

Some distros, like Ubuntu for example, list partitions in fstab and grub by their UUIDs instead of using /dev/sdan. The UUID for a prtition does not change if partitions are deleted or moved. This (at least in theory) avoids the problems you had. See this about UUIDs:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UsingUUID
Glad you figured it out and got it fixed. The next time you change your partitions you will know what to do.

thanks Tommcd and Kofucii 4 your insights and participation i now know what 2 do incase i encounter the same problem next time.

all the best.