Hi,
I'm having a problem with Mandrake 9.1. I arealdy
installed it twice but the problem always comes back
after a few uses.
Basically, when I'm booting the system it
stops on "mounting local files systems" and hangs there
forever. I suspect this could be a problem with
my fstab configuration but I can't get in the system
to send it to you guys. Did anybody had this problem?
How can I fix it?

My systems is a Dell Inspiron 5100 Laptop.
I dual boot it with Windows XP/Mandrake.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks

It only happens after a few uses?

I had this problem, it sometimes used to hang at Checking Dependencies but when it got past that it would hang when Mounting Filesystems. I also found the installation worked but then I couldn't boot. When I solved the problem, I did not have to re-install it was there waiting.

I had a new USB mouse and had put it in the front socket on my computer to see if it worked, before installation. I had to adjust the BIOS, and sure enough it was OK.

Once working, I moved it to a rear USB socket and it was at this point things went wrong. I then tried plugging it through an adaptor into the PS/2 socket, and it hung just the same.

I remembered I had changed the BIOS, and reset the mouse setting back to its original setting. Suddenly everything worked fine. It seemed that the adjusted BIOS setting is there to let Windows know that there is a mouse attached, even before the USB drivers kick in. In Linux I suspect that the system was told about the mouse, but then could not actually find it where it had been told it would be, and went into an infinite loop!

More recently I had a hang on booting when I left an incompatible digital camera I had just used in Windows switched on and plugged in when booting Linux.

You may have to check your BIOS and/or disable a piece of incompatible hardware on your system. Alternatively you may need to use a distro which does not detect Hardware, so you would have to configure it by hand yourself.

I hope this helps...

DAVE

Well, it happened twice. Now I'm on windows again but get
get in. If your question is whether I managed to use linux for a while, the answer is yes I did.

I managed to find a piece of paper I had here with an error it was occurring during boot. It says:

ldm_validate_partition_table(). Disk read fail

I'm not sure the above was the cause.

Dave suggestion may also be the cause. I remember that
last night I installed my pocket pc dock station on
windows (yesterday it was working). But then again, I
don't remember installing anything on the previous
time it happened (and I had to re-install Mandrake),

Thanks