Hi guys, I removed my second hard disk to give to my grandma and now mandrake won't boot. It asks me if I'd like to repair it and i say yes, then it asks for my root password and then i sit with a ext2: prompt.

It was an ext2 drive on mandrake 10.0

Any suggestions would be very helpful, because I need my PC back!

Thanks a lot!

You probably had the partitions on your second hard drive listed in /etc/fstab so that they would automount and run certain checks at boot to confirm the filesystems on those partitions are not corrupted. Your system reads fstab at boot and tries to mount the missing partitions. When it can't find them, it thinks that the filesystem(s) on the missing partitions are corrupted and tries to repair them to no avail.

The solution is to edit fstab and comment out or delete any references to the partitions on the second hard drive. The easiest way is to use a bootable linux cd like knoppix which will give you access to your root partition so you can edit fstab.

Thanks, I have a knoppix 3 disc, so i'll try that shortly. I had the HD mounted to /mnt/movies/ if that helps (i just used it to backup movies)

After a little fight between Knoppix and I (i couldn't get the change read/write permissions to work, so I decided to just use VI in konsole), it worked flawlessly and I am back in Mandrake.

Thanks a million!

Your welcome. Glad it worked!! For future reference, you can get konqueror to come up with root privileges in knoppix by first unmounting and remounting the partition you want write access to as root:

$su
<hit Enter>
# umount /mnt/hdxx
# mount /mnt/hdxx
# konqueror

Knoppix has no root password; hitting the Enter key after doing su takes you to root. With the above, konqueror will come up with root privileges. Then you just navigate to the file you want to edit and click on it and the file will come up in a root kedit for editing.

that's precisely how i did it, just used vi instead of konquerer. thanks again for all the help!