twice now i have had a problem with mandrake failling on startup. during boot i start getting a lot of failed messages like vfat not supported, and none of the partitions will mount. and the whole thing becomes unbootable. both times this has happened i didnt make any changes to the system at all, and it works fine for like a week but then one time i just shutdown normal but then during restart boom. i know my hard drive is good. i dont really know whats going on, just wondering if anyone else had sim probs. i think ill go back to redhat

What filesystem do you have? ReiserFS, Ext3 or Ext2? If you're using Reiser or Ext3, it's rather not filesystem problem, if not (so you have ext2), it may be - boot from 1st installation cd in rescue mode and run fsck on your disk. Could you write more? Do you remember more about the error messages?

i cant remember the file system, whatever m9 defaults to. i moved on though and installed redhat. i dont think ill ever know what the prob was but found it rather distressing hence my quick change to rh. thanks for the reply though, i wanted to see if i was the only one this hapened to.

I had some problems using Ext2 with Mandrake 9. But when I did another install (put in 9.1) and used ReiserFS, it all went away and became rock solid.

On my gf's laptop, she has 9 and Ext2 and so far she's doing ok. Although I will upgrade her to ReiserFS and 9.1 as soon as I can get my hands on her machine

so your gf runs linux eh