hao2lian wrote:After I finish installing Mandrake 9.0 which goes nice and dandy, the computer restarts and LILO pops up. I choose Linux and then, eventually, it takes me to a page where a lot of the startup stuff happen (I remember the phrase "Press 'I' for interactive startup"). It gets down to "Finding module dependencies" or something like that and then it gives me the error of not being able to locate the filesystem /dev/hdb1, which I used auto-allocate in Mandrake's installer to set up. It gives me the error:
The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2 filesystem. If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2 filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock:
e2fsck -b 8193 <device>
Doing that doesn't work. I tried all the superblocks. Tried going through the installation again. Doesn't work. Any ideas?
BTW, searching through LinuxQuestions.org, it seems a fair number of people experience this but there has been no solution.
There's no good software reason for it to be doing this right after install.
1) possible bad BIOS settings.
Are you using auto-detect for your IDE drives? Try going into the BIOS, note the current settings (cylinders, heads etc). and select "auto-detect", see if the values change.
Also, see if "LBA" is selectable in your BIOS. What's the current value?
2) possible bad drive.
Who's the vendor? They should have a reinitialization tool, more info here :
http://freepctech.com/pc/001/007.shtml
A reinit is the lowest-level format that's ok to do on modern drives. Make sure the BIOS settings are ok from #1 before you do anything like this!
