A little background info:

hdb WinXP installed first
hdd contained Slack.

I think my hdd drive is going so I thought I'd wipe out hdb and start from there. I ran cfdisk /dev/hdb and deleted all windows partitions and created my linux partitions. Rebooted to Slack 9.1 cd and after formating the partitions, the install failed at the very beginning with a bunch of inode errors.

I downloaded the HD's manufacturers utilities and performed all tests and came up clean. I then did a low level format. Now when I boot up to Slack 9.1 setup and then try to run cfdisk, it can't open/find /dev/hdb

I also can't boot up my existing slack install on hdd. I'm thinking the lowlevel format wiped out the MRB as well?

Any ideas as to how to proceed from here? I've been running linux for a while but still quite a noob. Thanks for any help.

Ralph

It sounds like some hard drive problems related to dieing drives. Do they make any funny/loud noises? Can you give an example of the inode errors you were receiving?

Sorry, I can't remember what the inode errors were now. What really started this all off was, my 2 year old son hit the reset button while linux was running. After slack ran 2sfsck automatically, I started to hear a random click from the case, I assumed was coming from the HD, only when I clicked on certain title bars. It doesn't make the noise all the time.

The hd that linux is installed on is near 6 years old. The one I want to install it on is only about a year old.

Now when I turn the machine on, it doesn't even get to the lilo screen. After searching for a boot cd, a bunch of 99 99 99 99 appear on the screen and then it just hangs.