I have an old Dell OptiPlex 266 running RedHat 8 which I am using as an MP3 jukebox. Everything worked fine until I decided to install a sound card to replace the onboard sound. When I re-booted the machine, I got the following errors:

Activating swap partitions: swapon: /dev/hdg3: No such device or address [FAILED]

And then a bit later:

Checking file systems
fsck.ext2: No such device or addressPossibly non-existent or swap device? while trying to open /dev/hdh1
/boot: clean, 43/26104 files, 127041/104391 blocks [FAILED]

***An error occurred during the file system check.
***Dropping you to a shell; the system will reboot
***when you leave the shell.

Give root password for maintenance (or type Control-D for normal setup):

I have 2 Western Digital 160 gb hard drives (I have a big music collection ) running off of an ATA controller card. In order to install the sound card, I had to temporarily disconnect the IDE cable from the controller card. I assumed that I had not properly reconnected the cable, so I re-reconnected it and rebooted. No luck. I removed the new sound card and checked the connections to the hard drives. I even replaced the controller card and the IDE cable (one came with each hard drive), but I'm still getting the same error.

Help!!

you didn't change a slave drive to a master or anything, did you? have you tried removing the sound card just to see if it still recognizes your drives?

No, the only thing I (intentionally) did was disconnect the controller card. I did not mess with the hard drives at all.

And I've removed the sound card without any luck.

i don't know what to tell you, maybe someone else does but maybe not. i have an old pentium 2 compaq that (i think) has a BIOS problem that makes the primary slave fall comletely out of recognition after a crash, power outage, or similar event. when you reconnected the ide cables to the controller card, did you connect them to the same ide channels? if you didn't (i.e. switched them around) then they may have different addresses (i.e. the drive that should be hdg is now hdh). just a guess. i would go back to the old controller card because it may have a different module so the os won't recognize the new one (since it still uses the old module).

Edit the file /etc/fstab and remove the wrong lines.

There is the possibility you damaged the motherboard with static electricity when you installed the sound card. You should always ground yourself to the case before touching a circuit card or better yet use a ground strap.

Do you have any hard drives that you can connect to the onboard IDE controller to tes the system?