Hello!
Yesterday, I added a new drive to my computer then rebooted it. Once in linux, I used the "hard drives" option in the "mount points" area of the "mandrake control centre" to format and assign the new drive (hdb). Subsequently I was able to read and write to the partition ("/shared", if anyone cares.)
This morning, however the system wouldn't boot properly (some sort of super block kind of error to do with 'hdb' ). I was able to get the system to boot by going into fstab and commenting out the line dealing with hdb1.

Please see the fstab listed below (the comment is still in place). Is there something 'goofy' about the offending line? I would really prefer not to reformat the drive again, as I have just transferred a lot of data there from my old disk.

/dev/hda5 / ext3 defaults 1 1
none /dev/pts devpts mode=0620 0 0
/dev/hda6 /home ext2 defaults 1 2
none /mnt/cdrom supermount dev=/dev/hdc,fs=auto,ro,--,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0
none /mnt/floppy supermount dev=/dev/fd0,fs=auto,--,iocharset=iso8859-1,sync,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
# /dev/hdb1 /shared ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/hda2 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/hdb1 /mnt/hd auto user,iocharset=iso8859-1,kudzu,codepage=850,noauto,umask=0,exec 0 0

thanks in advance for any suggestions you might have,
doug

So, what is filesystem currently on /dev/hdb1? is it ext3 or something else... I see there are two entries for /dev/hdb1, so which one does give an error???

Your fstab has it mounted twice.
> # /dev/hdb1 /shared ext3 defaults 1 2

> /dev/hdb1 /mnt/hd auto user,iocharset=iso8859-1,kudzu,codepage=850,noauto,umask=0,exec 0 0

If there were not any errors then can you see you data on /mnt/hd? Just change /mnt/hd to /mnt/shared. I assume MDK added it automatically when it was created.

My initial guess is that it isn't formated as ext3.

Hello!
For what ever reason that they were there, I guess it was the overlapping entries in the fstab that were the cause of my problems. Thanks for your help, and next time I will more of an effort to figure out a problem before posting!

regards,
doug