If anyone could help please please do. I have had FC5 funning on my Dell inspiron 5100 laptop for several months now with no problems. A couple weeks ago the laptop just started locking up making me power cycle it. Well last night it locked up I think 3 times. The first time I restarted, it came back up, and about 5 minutes later it locked up again. I restarted it again, and as soon as gnome loaded it was locked up before I could even move the mouse. When I power cycled it this time however it will not boot. When I start it I get this message:

Reading all physical volumes. This may take a while...
Found volume group "VolGroup00" using metadata type lvm2
2 logical volume(s) in volume group "VolGroup00" now active
EXT3-fs: error loading journal.
mount: error mounting /dev/root on /sysroot as ext3: Invalid argument
setuproot: moving /dev failed: No such file or directory
setuproot: error mounting /proc: No such file or directory
setuproot: error mounting /sys: No such file or directory
switchroot: mount failed: No such file or directory
Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!

I am unable to do anything with it. I am at the end of a summer internship and all of my contact information, travel information, email, everything is on this laptop that I really need. Also slightly less important, while away for my internship I have taken a lot of pictures which now only exist on this laptop and I have no time to retake them since I am leaving in a week. Anyway, any suggestions for me to try I would greatly appreciate it!!!

Thanks
Matthew

I had something similar happen to my desktop last spring. My computer never ceased to start up, but it did lock up usually at the most inconvient times. What it ended up being was a faulty power supply. For a laptop that gets a lot trickier, and in all honesty I would go to the manufacter if the system is still under warrenty. Since manufacters are so wonderful at recovering data (as one of my coworkers tells me) look into a portable hard drive on Ebay that you can hook the hard drive from your laptop into and transfer all the data. And remember- MAKE BACKUPS.

Good luck- depriving a geek of his computer is like depriving a junkie his speed.

Shane

Thanks, the laptop is over 3 years old and way out of warranty so going to Dell is out of the question. And another bit of information here, I used a knoppix bootable cd to start the computer up, and then tried to mount the drive and it fails. I loaded QTPartd to see what it had to say and it shows my two partitions, the boot partition, and then the data one, but it lists the main partition as being of type unknown. Any way to change that?

Thanks much
Matthew

Hmmm... I am not sure, to me it sounds like the drive is dead. I'm going to have to defer to someone who knows more about this than I do.

For your sake I really hope its not dead.

Haha yeah I really hope so as well. I know the drive is at least functional as I can still boot to the drive it just crashes as soon as it needs to access data on that partition. I can also mount the boot partition while using knoppix. I just can not get into the partition that holds my data so I can at least try to back it up.

Thanks
Matthew