I am running Mandrake 9.2 on a Dell Optiplex GX150

I have been using Linux for 4 years and this is the first time anything like this has ever happened. The install is three days old and this is the second time this is happened. I reinstalled last time in hopes that that would fix my problem. I have used these CD's before so i know they are good.

THE PROBLEM:

A random reboot while doing nothing of particular importance, IE web surfing, GAIM chatting during lunch.

The machine rebooted and will not boot, it reboots during boot even in failsafe mode. I can't see the line that it stops on when it crashes but i think that it may be mounting one of my partitions.

Any ideas on how to Fix my OS so it will start once more, I have done SO much work on it and i will break down if i have to re-install again. The disk check you can optionally run on startup comes back clean. I am new to Mandrake so i do not know if they have some sort of repair utility or what. :-(

I appreciate your response

Richard

Can you bot from the cd (rescue mode)? Then try to get to your logs (/var/log/messages, but on your hd). There may be something interesting.

How do you boot into rescue mode?

Put in the first CD in of the Mandrade disk series and you should be able to get into some type of mode that will allow you to boot without mounting the parititions. Then individually mount the parititions to /mnt and go from there. (Example: Note, your filesystem may be different, as well as other values):

mnt -t ext2 /dev/hdaX /mnt/usr