[Techtalk] FC2 stopped booting

[Gwen Morse]

Hi, all.

I've had ongoing strangeness with my system since I blew away my 
modules.conf and modprobe.conf.dist files. I finally resolved that 
tonight, and moved from one problem to another. I'm running FC2 with a 
vanilla kernel from kernel.org.

My laptop locked up, and so I turned off the power and booted again. 
Normally that's not a good thing, but, it was completely frozen. Now, 
when I try to reboot it tells me it can't load the root directory and 
drops me into the emergency shell (the terminal mode which says to use 
ctrl-d to get out).

from that shell, I can sort of manuever around. The partitions are still 
there, but, they mount as read-only.

When I try "fdisk /dev/hda", I get a warning message that my number of 
cylinders is set to 9729 and it ought to be 1024. When I browse my 
partition table, I have the following partitions:

hda1   1-5                  Dell Util
hda2   6-4084            HPFS/NTFS
hda3   4085-7839      Win95 Fat
hda4   7840-9729      Win 95 Extended
hda5   7840-7852      Linux (I think this is my /boot drive)
hda6   7853-8932      Linux (this is my root drive)
hda7   9633-9729      Swap

hda2 is set with the bootable toggle. The "Dell Util" partition contains 
proprietary dell files for my Inspiron laptop.

When I use a redhat or fedora rescue disk, it tells me there are no 
linux partitions to mount. However, the partition _is_ there. I was able 
to navagate through my home directory on hda6 in read-only mode.

I tried moving the boot toggle to hda5, but, that didn't work, so, I put 
it back. Is this an issue with the boot directory needing to be below 
the 1024 cylinder (and, if so, what is the resolution because this is 
generally the way I remember the partition table looking in the past and 
it worked).

I can still boot into W2k.

Gwen