hey guys im a newbie so bear with me here a bit...

I have 2 hard drives, one with mandrake 8 and one with win2k installed. When I try and boot (to linux) it tells me it can't mount root. when i specify the correct address of root (/dev/hda5) before booting it finds the kernel fine. however, as it continues to boot it gives me this error "fsck.ext2: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read while trying to open /dev/hdb5". That hdb5 isn't a typo. It allows me to go into command line mode then, and when i open up /etc/fstab all of my filesytems appear to be mounted on hdb rather than hda!

in addition to my cd drive and my floppy, etc, it reads:
/dev/hdb5 / ext2 defaults 1 1
/dev/hdb6 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/hdb7 /var ext2 defaults 1 2

I think this came from me switching around some of my harddrives, but how do I change these to point to the correct devices? They should all be on hda. Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks!

When you swap drive locations you need to change your fstab file
Edit the /etc/fstab file and change from hdb to hda.

To fix the boot problem assuming your using lilo, edit /etc/lilo.conf and change root= from hdb to hda

rerun lilo.

I tried editing /etc/fstab but it says there was an access error, even when I was using the root account. It says it is a read only system file. I tried to chmod it, but that didnt seem to help. Thanks

Check your BIOS to make sure your HDD configuration is right.

you have to remount you rootfilesystem by typing

# mount -n -o remount,rw /

this should work....