I partitioned my hard drive to have Mandrake Linux and Windows XP. They both worked fine for a day or two, then when I tried to get into Linux yesterday, it said this: "Press Y within 4 seconds to force file system integrity check." and whether or not I pressed Y, it did it anyway. After checking some stuff, it said "Fail to check filesystem, Do you want to repair errors?" If I said no, my monitor would blink and it would say "PC Display Settings Correct?" Then they went away and nothing happenes. If I said yes, It went through a thing and 'repaired' some stuff, then went to the "PC Display Settings Correct?" thing. It does that everytime now I try to get into Linux. It worked fine before, and I don't thing I really did anything that would make it do that.

What is happening with it, and how can I fix it?

Thx.

How did you shutdown linux? You didnt just press the power button did you?

No, I went to log out and restart or whatever.

What file systems are each partition on this drive?

file systems?

i dont know, i have windows xp on hda2 and linux on hda3, and it checks through hda3, and says something like "Inode [some numbers] i_blocks is [something]. should be [something]. FIXED.
and it goes through a bunch of that.

I mean XP's probably on an NTFS filesystem right. Do you remember which ones you picked for your linux partitions? Did you partition when installing or use a seperate app before?

Oh, yes, XP is NTFS. I used PowerQuest Partition Magic to partition it, Linux is a Ext2 or something.

So if you pick yes, then load and then reboot linux you still get the same errors?
Do you remember installing anything just before this happened? Did you have anything crash on you? Have you had a power cut recently?

Yea, when I pick yes, the same thing still happens.
I didn't really install anything before this that I can remember.
But come to think of it... I think the power might have gone out sometime around when this started...
Would that be why it's doing this?
How would I fix it? Would I have to reinstall Linux or something?

Well do you have all the things you've downloaded for linux backed up on the windows partition?
If you have nothing to loose but personal configurations then a re-install will almost certainly fix this. Plus you can use your new experience to make an even better install.

I'm fairly sure there's a command to help fix the drive. Try man fsck or search other threads about hard drive problems.

Next time pick ext3 or ReiserFS. These haver journalising which keeps a small log of all file actions, to be able to roll them back when problems like power cuts or crashes strike.

Alright, I'll just reinstall. I don't really have much on it anyway, considering I just installed it a few days ago.

Thanks for the help.

I hope you understand a bit more now atleast

Okay... So I reinstalled Linux and everything went fine, untill it went into Linux after the installation.
My monitor said...
"PC Display Settings Correct?" And then nothing.
Is their something wrong with my monitor maybe?

Alright, nevermind, I fixed it.