Hi there, thanks Jesse, I'll try thy pointers. > Wow, /dev/hda<x> doesn't exist...? Nope. I haven't tried using fdisk yet, but partitions are not accessible when I boot into this Fedora failsafe mode. > Does /dev/MAKEDEV exist? Mmh... I haven't looked yet. I guess, I'll follow Jesse's pointers, they seem logical to me, though I guess the BIOS should find the drive alright. After all, I couldn't boot into failsafe mode from the physical drive if the BIOS can't handle it, could I? I'll boot the system from a Knoppix CD on Sunday and make a backup of all the data first before tampering any further. I'll then use fdisk from the Knoppix disk to determine the status of the partitions. What log files apart from /var/log/messages do I/you need to investigate what happened or how to fix it? This breakdown is somewhat unnerving because if I can believe the users it came out of the blue. I just had everything running smoothly. And then the system doesn't seem to appreciate all my work and quit on me... grrrrr :-( If the cause for my troubles is an inconsistent filesystem, can I boot Knoppix and start e2fsck/fsck from the Knoppix CD or do I have do call the onboard utilities to fix filesystem errors? thanks, Tobias
