Hey all,
I was using Mandrake (10) just a few minutes earlier, and while loading the computer configuration app, it started getting a slow... really slow... and then most of KDE - well, disappeared. Poof. I was left with the config window and my GAIM window, neither of which had borders, or (hence) could be moved or modified in any way. I spent a couple minutes trying to get KDE to reappear (no, the taskbar wasn't just hidden) and, having no luck, I decided that I'd just shut it down manually (since I couldn't get out of KDE either) and reboot. Big mistake, I guess.

I rebooted it and started loading Linux to find that /etc/fstab was basically totally corrupted, which is, obviously, somewhat problematic.

I popped in my install disc, ran it under rescue mode and fsck'd dev/hda2 (my Linux partition) with -f - nothing looked abnormal, so now I guess what I need to do is try to restore/rewrite my /etc/fstab, but I'm really not sure how to do this from the rescue prompt. I was thinking I could make a copy of a bare-bones fstab, load it on a floppy and try to copy it that way, but will that work if the floppy is DOS/Windows formatted? It would be nice if there were some way to restore an earlier version of fstab, actually, because I'm not sure how well Mandrake will work on this laptop with a bare-bones version.

Suggestions? Am I just going to have to do a fresh install and hope this doesn't happen again?

When fstab is rewritten, mdk should make a backup copy of the old fstab automatically at /etc/fstab~. If you can mount your root partition in rescue mode you should be able to overwrite your corrupted fstab with the backup fstab~ by doing:

# mv /etc/fstab~ /etc/fstab

Before doing so you might want to check and make sure fstab~ looks good by running:

# cat /etc/fstab~

Thanks... I tried that earlier and I couldn't get it to work, but I was just leaving the house and hence in a bit of a rush - I didn't get to try everything I would've liked to (read: I'm not sure I did it right) so I'll have to try again when I get home and hopefullly I'll be able to work things out.

If not, I guess I'll try with the floppy and if that doesn't work I'll probably just reinstall - I didn't have much on the Linux partition anyway.