Hi,
My system was working fine (Slackware 8.1) and last night I shut down the
system to place in an old hard drive.. There was some old data I wanted to get of the drive so after I rebooted as normally and I noticed the 2nd hard
disk drive was detected just fine by Slackware during the hardware lookup.

To mount the drive I did
I did 'mount -t vfat /dev/hdb1 /win98-2'
Then the drive was mounted and I could access it just fine.
A little while later I shut down the system again to make a change in the
system BIOS. I turned on ACPI for the monitor power off feature.

When the system rebooted I'm seeing all the hardware being detected
and loadomg just fine till it gets to
"partition check:
hda: _"
The cursor sits there and blinks...

To troubleshoot I removed that 2nd hard drive and have also reset the
BIOS ACPI settings to the previous values. I even did reset config on the BIOS. But the problem still prevails.

I've used LNX BBC which is a linux boot-able rescue disk but it hangs on
partition check: also. I've used my slackware 8.1 ISO CD and booted
of it and it also hangs at partition check. I've also tried a bootdisk
that I created, that doesn't work either as it also hangs on
'partition check'

Here is the hard drive details
hda1 - win98
hda5 - / (ext2 file system)
hda6 - etc for linux partitions....

hdb1 is win98 from a different system (this is the 2nd hard drive i
temporarily stuck in to retrieve data)

I'd like to run fsck on HDA but I can't get past the 'partition check'
What shall I do?

Alex

Hello,

does this one still work?

I know about at least one tool for Windows providing access to ext2 partitions, but I'm not sure whether it works on W98 (I have it on W2k). So you can check the accessibility of this partition. An alternative is e.g. Partition Magic, which can also do a filesystem check.

Good Luck!

cu

hp_tux

Redetect the drives in the bios

You may need to try default or failsafe settings. This may jack windows around some what due to the hardware changes but it should be ok.

Well ever think is hunky dory now. I'm not sure what was causing the problem.
When this problem was occurring I could not boot into windows 98 either the
system would just hang on boot. I had also loaded the fail safe settings in th BIOS
but that didn't work either. What is peculiar to me is that the main hard drive is
only 3 months old. And it almost seemed to me that something was wrong with
the disk drive. I shut the system down for the night and the next morning everything
worked just fine!?!?!! I tried repeatedly to reproduce the problem but could not.
I think it might have been heat related but alas I'm just not sure since I can't
reproduce the problem. Thanks for the suggestions on the problems though.

Alex

Could be a problem with the IDE controller.. How old and what brand is the motherboard?

Some weird wild stuff can happen with bad IDE controller or bad IDE cables.

--Shade

Hi,

I'm glad I got a reply. I've been wondering about this.
Here is my motherboard, I wrote a review on it just last week.
http://www.linuxquestions.org/hcl/sh...hp?product=788
Soyo K7V Dragon Plus
The CPU is an AMD althlon 1800 (1533mhz)

The IDE cable that connects the Hard disks to the motherboard is
one that was included with the new Western Digital Hard drive (60Gigbyte)
That is mine main hard drive.

I forgot to mention also when this was happening (at night around 10pm), I had
shut the machine down and looked inside at the drives to check the ribbon cables.
When I brought it back up the system was fine, but I rebooted about 10 minutes
later and it happened again, and again. Thats why I was thinking it was heat related.
I had the system off probably about 25 minutes. I was thinking maybe that cooled
of some component...

As of today its still working just fine, I rebooted twice into winblows and had
no trouble when I came back into linux.

O yeah the IDE controller chip,, i think thats what it is has its own fan on the board.
Its free of dust and the fan is working.

Let me know what you think.
Alex