grub: Error 18

I know that there are loads of threads on grub error 18, I've looked through a few but cant find anything that might help because I am almost entirely a newbie... also they all tend to be about people moving disks, installing new drives and things... I dont have this problem... anyway, enough of the apologising...

I installed FC3 onto my laptop about a month ago, and have been very happy as, for once... nothing broke... I cant remember doing anything to it last night but when I came to boot this morning grub came up with error 18. I have updated the kernel twice, but that was a while ago and I cant see how it would have any effect on now. What I did find, though is that, out of my 3 kernels (I know, I know.. I should clean up!!!) my 'middle one' boots, which is always nice... the only problem is that it doesnt load X... which isnt.. not only that, it decides to mount the whole of my filesystem as read only and moans a lot about it when its booting.

From what I can see, as this all happened together, I just need to fix whatever is wrong with my bootloader... hopefully that will 'free up' my filesystem.

I am constantly learning about linux and I know that many of the questions I ask will be some really obvious ones and I apologise again for them.

Thanks for your time.

Nistur

Been playing with the BIOS ??? - 18 is usually an architecture problem.
Try changing the Disk to "LBA" and see what happens.

How do I do that, and no, I havent been playing with my bios, well... all I did was put a password on boot but I cant see that effecting it...
Someone told me that, with my kernel, grub sometimes has problems and I can edit /etc/grub.conf and remove something like ro root=/ or something... I dont want to make more of a mess... so I thought I would ask about it first... unfortunately I cant access emacs, vi or vim from grub but I have a copy of DSL that I am booting from at the moment.

The only thing that I can think of that I was doing is that I was quickly backing up stuff from my computer onto my laptop before formatting my computer, I might have filled one of my partitions, again, i cant see why this would affect it, but its the only thing I have done to it just before it refused to boot. It did actually deny all existance of a hard disk at one point, but I left it for about 10 mins and tried again and it just came up with the Grub error.

Thanks again

Nistur

Try Knoppix and see if that has any issues.
Simple (and non-destructive) first test.

It doesnt matter now, it would seem that my harddisk was playing up.. now the reading heads have fallen of and start clicking every time I try and boot up... not good!!! fortunately it should still be under guarantee and I can send it back to Dell... I just hope that they can get the data off it becauseI need it for my work ... thanks for your help anyway