I installed Slackware 9.1, spent an hour and a half trying to get WinME to reboot in DOS (I'm setting up a dual-boot system), finally got loadlin and my boot menu to work together, and tried to use it to boot into Slackware. Unfortunately, /etc/fstab seems to be missing, giving me a screenful of various error messages; I think they're all probably caused by this (please see below.)

Warning: couldn't open /etc/fstab: No such file or directory
/sbin/e2fsck: Is a directory while trying to open /

The superblock coule not be read or does not describe a correct ext2 filesystem. If the device is valid and it really contains an ext3 filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock
e2fsck -b 8193 <device>

(then a nice frame of askeriske surrounding the following error message)
An error occurred during the root filesystem check. You will noe be given a chance to log into the system in single-user more to fix the problem. If you are using the ext2 filesystem, running e2fsck -v -y <partition> might help.

IIRC (I would check, but I don't know how from outside Linux!), my disk is partitioned into /dev/hda1 (Windows), /dev/hda2 (extended), /dev/hda5 (swap), and /dev/hda6 (/).

What might have caused this, and how can I fix it? Thank you!

-pi314159

This might have caused due to the improper shutting down of the pc... using the reset button... which is the common case with with windows... but with linux if u do not shutdown the system properly these kind of messages would be quiete common.... so do shutdown the system using poweroff or shutdown -h now....

to solve the problem regarding the /etc/fstab it is that u should get a copy of fstab file and edit the file according to your configurations... if u want i can send a copy of the fstab file....

Thank you, I would appreciate that greatly. Or perhaps you could post it here, so that others can refer to it if they run into the same problem?

So once I edit it, save it to a floppy...what do I do? I'm thinking that I should probably boot from the CD and
mv /dev/fd0/fstab /etc/fstab
...would that work?

Thanks!

Fixed it! I just booted in with the floppy and recreated /etc/fstab. Not hard.

Thanks!

-pi314159