Hi all

I've made 3 hardware changes recently.
1. added extra 1/2 gig of memory.
Suse 9.3 didn't boot 1st time but then managed to boot without any issues.
2. Replaced my DVD drive with a new dual layer one (same make as previous, Emperex).
Again Suse seemed ok, and I loaded a disk of MP3s and they played ok.
3. I've 2 hard drives.
Drive 0 sata 160 gig with 2 partitions, windows NTFS and Suse ReiserFS, + swap area and GRUB.
Drive 1 ide 120 gig with 2 partitions, 60g NTFS and 60g ReiserFS.

I wanted to free up some space to back up some photos etc so I scrubbed the reiserFS partition on Drive 1 and reformatted it to NTFS (all my stuff is on Windows), using the windows disk manager system util.
XPs fine with this but Suse now won't boot a all.

The odd thing is that I get different results each boot
* got some KDE messages about a system crash
* only get as far as the NVIDIA splash screen
* stalls on the "starting hardware" Suse boot screen.

failsafe mode is no better.

I do use Suse for most of my internet activity, so I'd like to get it back asap.

Any ideas?

literally minutes after writing the above in XP I rebooted to see if I could get any better diagnostics from my Suse startup and I'm in Suse now! no problems!!

What the heck?

Is there a system log somewhere that keeps track of past system activity and crashes etc?

I mean, I know LinuxQuestions.org is superb, but does it have supernatural abilities? (ha)

Anyhow, well pleased to be back in Suse land but a bit concerned about my systems stability.

Do a ls /var/log/ to see what you have. You probably want to look at boot.log and messages.

Also, try the dmesg | less command.

(And, since linuxqueations seems to have such powers, consider becomming a contributing member. [Click on the link under my name at the left for info.])

thanks for that
theres loads of info in the messages file,so I'm trying to compare to good start with a bad one, but this isn't a particularly scientific approach on my part.
Firefox is misbehaving too, loosing all my bookmarks, but that's the least of my worries. I've switched to Opera, which seems more reliable.
Anyhow I've also made sure that DMA is switched on on my IDE drive, I've seen this on another thread.

Now for some controlled boot ups. Thanks for the tip on the messages file again.