I have been using Opensuse 10.1 and GRUB for several weeks now. Recently, Grub has taken much longer to load and SUSE has not been booting, it just stays at one screen for ages with no loading progress. I tried using an old linuxcare bootable disk V1.5 and itdidnt help me. can anyone help?

More details needed.
Does it get to the GRUB screen (with the choices listed)---but this step simply takes longer?
When it proceeds to try and boot SUSE, do you see any text going by? What screen do you see?
When you say you tried the Linuxcare disk, what exactly happened?
During start up, you should see a bunch of messages from the BIOS--watch this for anything unusual---eg taking a long time finding your harddrive

If it takes longer to start grub, that almost suggests hardware problems--the bios messages should give a clue.

Can you boot up from a "live CD" distro such as Knoppix?
Do you have Windows also on the machine? Will Windows boot up?

yes it does go to it, but takes much longer to load. when it loads suse, the standard startup text that shows it booting from the partition is also present but takes a very long time unlike it used to. windows boots fine.

ISSUES IN LINUXCARE DISK: when I entered the boot: linux command, the following came up after lots of seemed normal:

FAT Bread Failed

invalid session number or type of track

and the coup de gras: kernel panic: unable to mount root fs on 0:30a

the standard command [boot:] worked fine