> I'm facing quite a bad problem here im my Linux Box, and I'd like to try > a bit more before I give up, format the HD and reinstall it all... > > Last tuesday I had to shutdown Linux because I had to do some work on > Win98, unfortunately... The shutdown procedure worked fine, I worked all > afternoon on Win98 and shutdown the machine to go home... > > Yesterday I came back and, to my surprise, when I tried to boot on Linux > the system halted with a "kernel panic: unable to mount root fs on > 03:02" (I guess these were the numbers)...
the question is, what the hell happened to the system (if nobody else could cause the crash). some days ago win98 messed up a partition on my disk, because in the fat32-bootsector of the previous partition the partition size was wrongly specified (bigger than the actual size). so speedisk under windoze thought that it had enough space and happily overwrote the extended partition table of the next partition. neither of the windoze tools discovered the error and my linux-dosfsck is not even capable of checking fat32 at all - i don't know, if this still is a general problem ... so just in case, you use windoze beside of linux, too, you can get a *really* nice partitioning tool from http://www.users.intercom.com/~ranish/part/ (the beta works great). this programm was the only utility that was capable of discovering the size mismatch between partition table and boot sector btw: i don't need any help, i reconstructed the partition table "easily" :-)
