I have recently installed Mandriva (Mandrake Linux 10.2). The installation was fine. Indeed it was the most user friendly linux installation, as far as I know. But after installation it won't boot. Whether in normal mode or in failsafe mode it comes until
"Mounting root file systems
Activating SWAP partition"
and then it simply reboots.
Pls advise me what to do to boot into linux. I wud like to know the cause of the problem.
I have got the following configuration:
Pentium-4 2.4GHz
Kobian Mercury Motherboard with Intel 845GL Chipset & Realtek RTL8139/810X Family PCI Fast Ethernet NIC
256 MB DDR RAM
nVidia GeForce MX400 Video Card
40 GB Hard Disk
Partitioning Scheme:
10 GB NTFS Windows XP
10 GB FAT32
5.3 GB ext3 /
1 GB ext3 SWAP
3.3 GB ext3 /home
7.8 GB FAT32

Try this. As soon as you see the boot selection screen, hit the Esc key. That will take you to a boot prompt at which you should type:

linux noapic nolapic acpi=off

Hit the Enter key to start booting. This turns of acpi, part of the power management in your system BIOS and are the most common boot parameters to try when you have these kinds of problems. If it works, post back and I'll show you how to make the change permanent so you don't have to go through the above every time you boot.

I'm no expert by any means, and hopefully someone more experienced will chime in to either support or refute my recommendation here....

In my experience, if there's a problem at the mounting section of the boot process, it frequently is the result of a mangled /etc/fstab file.

You can boot off the Mandriva install disk and then use the rescue console to examine this file and compare it to what you see when you type 'lsparts' in the console. Somehow it seems like it's trying to use a non-swap formatted partition as swap. Hope this helps,

di11rod