Right not wanting to keep going on, but i sadly don't think you've grasped quite how terrified i am of screwing this linux box up.

looking at the print of hda i get the start and end of hda5 to be 639 to 702 and the main drive hda6 703 to 1212.

SO what do i do, i've

fdisk /dev/hda5

then i type m for the help commands.

Now what do i do, delete a partition (d) , then what? create a new DOS partition table or what? Thanks and apologies again for the whining

Nask

Wrong, I can imagine. Point is, do you have alternatives? If so, by all means, try those, I'm no guru either.

For the rest: in essence yes. Delete hda5 and create a new partition from 639 to 702 as linux swap, not DOS. Btw. what nasties did you do to mangle your swap that way?

On fdisk i tried to delete and it asked what partition (1 -4) so i paniced. ANyway i couldn't see the command in fdisk to create a linux swap file.

Oh I've had an idea, can i use partition magic on windows to recreate the partition? as i'm happier using that.

I think what will have causd the system to die on me will be using a program called explore e2fs which i use for transfering files from my linux system to the window application (which has worked fine for over a year now).

Right just used partition magic 7 to format the swap file (this has probably screwed something up no doubt) but lets see what happens. WIll keep you informed.


Thanks alot JZL240I-U for your help, it's much appriciated (oh it's booting up ont he pc next to me lets see whts happening)

and................

it doesn't hate the partition anymore (hurrah) but it still dies (boo hiss)

back to the origional problem
Checking root filesystem
/ contains a file system with errors, check forced.

Inode 98658 has imagic flag set

/: UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY; RUN fsck MANUALLY
(i.e., without -a or -p options)

now i try fsck it says

Inode 98661 oh wait it's scrolling to fast (damnit!) but something is happening, will again try and reboot. oh this is so exciting

Oh my good lord, my good good lord, the thing it's it's booted up and is runnign again!! Hurrah hurrah life is good

JZL240I-U thanks a load for your continued help this morning and to everyone else tht helped.

I'm off to go have a cup of celerbratory cup of tea and try and go learn some LINUX

Yippe, it's not busted

Nask (a very, very, happy impressed Nask at that)

Well, I'm glad you solved it. One last thought: I don't know, whether Partition Magic knows files of type linux swap. If it doesn't, you have to change the type form whatever you installed back to linux swap. Otherwise linux won't have swap space, which might result in slowing your machine or in extreme cases locking it (depending from how much RAM you've got). Also the content of /etc/fstab would be partly invalid.