every time i boot now it starts showing alot of fsck boot errors.
it looks like it trys to force a scann then i produces numerous i/o errors.
is there a way to capture the errors to post on the forum?
perhaps a boot log?

as for mounting the ext3, i changed it in my fstab and remounted it.
It said that the ext3 was an invalid fs (i'm assuming this means file system).

Keep the ideas rolling. I'm willing to keep trying

You can
tail -500 /var/log/messages
as root to see the last 500 log message lines (increase 500 if output does not show boot stage)

i'm not at my box (at work), so this is just a question to clarify w/o the capability of testing.
var/log/messages
Is this the location of my boot log file or system messages?
I have root tail disclosing security and system messages already, but I have never seen my boot log represented in it.
Is it a particular file in the log directory? or is it just the begining of the log file, that isn't disclosed by root tail?

Add a line to your rc.local :
This will create a log file containing boot messages in a txt file .

I can't say, I never used root tail, for my part, when I want to see what happened at boot stage, I used to tail /var/log/messages and sometimes /var/log/syslog too.

Hey!

I don't know if this still any help, but this just happened to me last night. (I run slackware10) And it oddly frooze during when i was scripting some php... So I rebooted my box, and at boot I got "Disk read error" "Press A key to Reboot"

Afterawhie, I booted knoppix, and could access /hda5/ which was my /home directory, and it seemed like /hda1 , my /root partition had nuked. I had always had trouble , of harddrives dieing, especially Maxtor 80gb. it seems samed thing had happened to you, your harddrive is on the verge of being completly useless (dead).


Greets!



Btw, if anyone knows of any ideas to get my info back would be helpful

Thanks!

Oh my! I also yesterday got the same error!!! Its on a old comp and this time the cdrom is a bit old and failing! (The hdd is working fine) Its pretty funny! In about every 12-13 tries I could manage to get some of the files read and copied.

I am not sure if this is a purely hardware problem or Slack has some minor issue with old drives because before installing slack the cd rom was working error free in Windows 98.

Maybe the driver for old cd is not compiled in your kernel...

What is your output for :
cat /usr/src/linux/.config | grep -i cd

or
cat /boot/config | grep -i cd