I did a kdar backup of system without system settings being saved. However 2 of CD's used reported i/o errors so restored a SuSE backup which saved settings. I had repartitioned the drive for a dual boot Debian / SuSE.

My problem is now that my hard drive thrashes when I use SuSE but eventually settles down and I can work. If I reboot the thrashing starts again. I think the problem is that the backup had different sized partitions to the way I have now partitioned the drive.

No problems with booting into either Debian or SuSE. How can I update SuSE
to see new sized partitions.

Boot SuSE. If the system is "thrashing" run top from a terminal to determine what is the cause. I suspect (without really knowing what you mean by thrashing) that the culprit may be updatedb which is normally run at or arround midnight as a chron job, but if SuSE is not running at the time this is specified to start, it will run shortly after the next boot. This will slog down a system while it is running, but will return to normal once updatedb finishes its indexing. No reason to have it run as a chon job - I run it manually in slack if I know I need to update due to system changes. Just remove it from chron if it is a problem.

Thanks for the reply. I suspected this myself, will change it so 'nobody' doesn't do updating as it can be very annoying as it doesn't run as a background process. You also confirmed a suspicion I had about why my PC would turn itself on again at midnight unless I actually pulled the plug out as well as turning it off.
Also wondered if I had a ghost or electrical surge somehow that booted the PC!

Cheers