I found a link on the web that mentioned how I can speed up my box. It suggested to add
hdparm -X66 -d1 -u1 -m16 -c3 /dev/hda
since I did that and did a reboot. I no longer can boot into suse. on startup the os just hangs. Its same even if i try to login in failsafe mode. I got knoppix, I wanted to comment the line in /etc/init.d/boot.local but I cant coz it says the file can be opened only in read only mode and I dont know how I can login as root and access /mnt/hda3

I am sort of frozen and need to get some imp. work done. Plz help!
(my distro suse was so damn slow, which led me to do this in the beginning).. now it actually backfired!!

Have you tried switching to root using "su -" and then editing the file?

from knoppix shell:

cd /mnt/hda3/etc/init.d
su -

still cant edit boot.local, says 'readonly' option is set (add ! to override)

To write to a read only file using vi, do ":w!" and then quit ":q".

Thanks for the suggestions. I know 'vi' pretty well. I think the problem has to do with the way knoppix mounts the linux partition. And this is how I fixed my problem.

- boot knoppix cd
- in a konsole, type
$ su -c
$ fdisk -l
$ mount -o rw /dev/hda3 /mnt
$ cd /mnt
$ vi /etc/init.d/boot.local
$ rm the culprit line (hdparm -X66 -d1 -u1 -m16 -c3 /dev/hda)

shut down & reboot. Boom, back to original state. Well, the above steps recovered the OS, but didnt solve the slow suse distro. thinking of moving to ubuntu or fedora 3 . Any thoughts ?

I've moved this Linux General because I've just realised that it was in the wrong forum. I've noticed that Suse is quite slow to boot up for me as well even with dma enabled. Fedora and Suse are both pretty good so give them a shot.