i recently installed grub again using yast2 (the best thing about Suse!) and altho the problem with the boot up still exists, i no longer hav to manually set the root to /dev/hda2 on start up - i think theres a text file in the /boot/grub directory which had to be altered. yast2 does all that for you.

however, i still hav the same problem aside from that which is strange as i am now using my old kernel and my old bootloader and settings, so it should work. i hav tried to run it in failsafe and theres is no change at all, still the IRQ probs and everything. i really dont understand it. are the /etc and the /boot directories the only ones which really affect the boot up sequence? i am starting to think it could be a corruption or missing file in there of some sort.

oh, and the names Fleeble and Floob were just off the top of my head - my floppy drive (/dev/fd0) is called /Ryo and my cd-drive (/dev/hdc) is /Fukuhara. what are urs called?

Well, sorry, forgot to mention the grub setup file. It's located in /boot/grub/menu.lst. It's a text file, and you don't have to reinstall the bootloader everytime you change it. You can edit it directly, w/o chrooting, it doesn't matter. Reboot and that's all. I'm using my mountpoints /mnt/floppy, cdrom, win_c thorugh f

The GRUB menu.lst might also be accessible through /etc/grub.conf (symlink), though I've seen this only on FC2 so far. Here's my /boot/grub/menu.lst:

You say that running failsafe gets you to RunLevel 1 and then goes to restart? That's pretty odd. You can try any other kernel you have (ie /boot/initrd-2.6.7-2dfx.img /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.7-2dfx and of course the modules located in /etc/modules/2.6.7-2dfx must be present). To test it, simply copy-paste an option in the boot config and edit it to suit your needs. My first entry would look like this (copied at the end of course):

Where instead of (hd0,1) you set your partition. HD0 is the HDA, so (hd0,0) is hda1. Look at /boot/grub/device.map to see your aliases. To boot from, say hdb1 you insert an option thast would be like this:

Notice that the kernel image and initrd are taken from the boot directory on the hdb1 partition! Try removing the acpi=ht option. There was something like acpi=no, noacpi or acpi=noacpi or acpi=off option to disable acpi. To disable APM (something much like ACPI) the option is "apm=off", so I guess it might be something like this.

ok i finally sorted it out by simply backing up all my directories n everything n reinstalling Suse Linux (i gave up!! lol). thaks a lot tho guys this forum is fantastic when something linux related goes wrong i dont know what i would do without it!!

i did find tho the best programs to use under the circumstances were yast2, the grub installer and reiserfsck to repair the filesystem. by the end it was too far gone to repair tho. o well! cheers anyway n keep using linux!