The other day my Linux PC crashed and would not reboot. I moved over to my backup PC since I had no time to work on it them. Today I had some time to look at it, but made no progress.

First some details.
- This is a Dual boot box with Suse and WinXP.
- Grub loads fine offering both Suse and windows as normal.
- Windows will boot normally.
- Linux halts during boot and goes to a terminal and requests the root pw rather than continuing to KDE desktop.
- The specific fsck (possibly fdisk?) error says something about running fsck manually, but goes by so fast I can't copy it down.

I logged in as root, and went to /var/log. There are no boot up or error logs from today so I'm unable to see the specific error.

My first question is obvious, How do I capture that error so I can post it and get help.

Second, I think the error mentions running fsck manually? While I've had this PC up for some time, I've never used fsck and I am more than a little intimidated by the idea of trying to use it now. Other than the man page, is there a fsck for dummies manual around?

From what you describe, it looks like one or more of your partitions have failed to mount during boot. Thus the system is asking you to run fsck on the failing partition.
Run df -hT to see which partitions are mounted.
Run fdisk -l to see what partitions you have on disk.

fsck is quite safe to run if the partition is NOT mounted. It is NOT safe to run on mounted partitions. So check the output of fdisk -l vs df -hT & try to figure out which partitions failed, then run fsck on that partition. If fsck warns you that the partitions is mounted, make sure you DO NOT proceed.