I recently installed Mandriva 2006 after my laptop hdd failed with 2005LE, onto a new 40gig drive (partitions: 10000meg linux (mandriva2006), 256meg swap (RAMx2), 10000meg fat32(winXP), and the rest ext3 storage (+/-14gigs)). I managed to recover my Home folder and restore (with some help), i'd prefer not to have to go through that again.

I have 2 External hdd brackets (Vantec Nexstar 3: 3.5" USB 2.0) with paralelle ATA harddrives (1x 15gig Western digital & 1x 250gig Seagate). Both these drives are formatted as ext3.

The last time i mounted these drives i shutdown the machine without unmounting the 2 drives, which should not have been a problem.

I did not connect the drives when i rebooted. I am getting an error after grub successfully activates the swap partition:

Checking filesystems
/dev/sdb1:
The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2 filesystem. If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2 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>

fsck.ext3: No such file or directory while trying to open /dev/sbd1 /dev/hda7: clean, 11/2231456 files, 102847/4458029 blocks
Failed to check filesystem. Do you want to repair the errors? (Y/N)
(beware, you can lose data)


Now i'm assuming that the storage partition is causing this problem, and i do not know if this has anything to do with the usb drives. I do not know the lilo command line very well, but did try the commands:
e2fsck -n

and:
e2fsck -b superblock

(probably incorrect syntax)
without any success.

please help!

Before you presume there is a problem, try starting the computer with the drives connected. If no trouble, unmount the drives before rebooting. If you still get the errors, post another message with the new errors (they will be different).

Thanx ernie

i had already tried that without success.

The problem was with fstab.

there was no "noauto" on the lines to mount the drives, i removed the fstab lines with vim and the machine boots.

thanx