Greetings all,

I need some advice:

This is the layout of my 40GB harddrive on my thinkpad 600
hda1 - / 5G
hda2 FAT32 13 G
hda3 /home 20G
hda4 /swap 700M (roughly)
these are primary partitions made in fdisk- nothing extended


It boots up into lilo manager- for linux(slackware 9.0) or win98se
try to load linux and get following errors:
swapon: cannot open etc/fstab: no such file or directory
/etc/rc.d/rc.S: line 23: Testing filesystem status: Read-only file
system
Checking root filsystem:
fsck 1.32
Warning: couldn't open /etc/fstab: No such File/Dir
/sbin/e2fsck: Is a directory while trying to open /
/:
The Superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2
filesystem. If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2
filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the uperblock
is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate
superblock:
e2fsck -b 8193 <device>

An error occured during the root filesystem check
you will now be given a chance to log into the system in a single-user
mode to fix the problem.
If you are using the ext2 filesystem, running 'e2fsck -v -y
<partition>'might help.....



okay what should i do to get this thing rolling?
is etx2 an extended partition? I know i used only primary ones
I typed in the command: swapon /dev/hda4
and it said: Adding Swap: 827336k swap-space (priority -1)
should this be added to some configuration file?
whats the deal with etc/fstab?
im at the root@none:/# looking confused. all i can see is thes strange
aquatic bird....

e2fsck -v -y /dev/hda1 resultsin>> /dev/hda1: clean, 137807/1281280
files, 525175/1281175 blocks

allthanks to the inspired linux guru whose favor shines upon i!

ext2 is a file system type. From what I see it's basically telling you it can't read the fstab, so it tries to read a disk partition, assumes it is ext2 formatted. It either isn't formatted with the ext2 file system, or there was some sort of an error during the making of the file system. Two questions -

Can you still boot win 98?
Has this machine EVER booted into Linux?

nope this is first time bootup on slackware....win98 runs fine....

Unfortunatly, the best thing I can think of at this point would be to re-install Slackware, paying special attention to the file system formatting (hint, choose reiserfs) and kernel selection.

what kernel should i select? I just chose the standard off of the install disk, i did notice there was an ibm specific....?

Bare.i is the usual one to get started with.

I'd say go with the standard again, unless you have some odd hardware like pcmcia scsi adapters ect.