**** imagine; all of everything that is or was, can be reduced to an equation less than one inch long ! *** Sorry but I've been fight w/ this problme on a couple of computers for a while now.. and cant get any help where I *might* have expected it... every time I have to reboot the main problme box, it claims that the drive wan't cleanly shut down ( wrong, but , nevermind ) It goes thru some of the error checking, and seems to give up in exaspiration! requires me to give a root pwd, adn run the fsck program on the drive.. ( the same one it just gave up on. So I go thru the eternal number of "clear yes?" items... eventually it comes to a lot of major problems ( it seems they are anyway ) And after much dancing on teh keys gives me a bootable hard drive ( at least until it's booted again <sigh> Q1) I tried PQmagic to run their check on it.. and PqM7 exits w/ a "fatal error" about which it prints all over the screen adn gives nothing useable ( error 0000:00 which isn't a pqm error msg.) OTH PQm6 will actually open it's program , show the drives and formatting info , etc... and if I ask it to do a check it gives me a "svere" error msg.. w/ only thier error code 1212 ( %luser has bad inode %luser ) not helpful , and I knew that.. there is NOTHING i either PQM book about the error messags, and they are eventually found on the website ( good luck if you can't GET to the web ! ) And it says words to teh effect "it's a really bad problem , back up you data adn reformat ! ( although that in fact doesn't solve teh problem. as I have reformatted and reinstalled this ( suse7.3 about 6 times on this box this week end! ( and I've got the migraine to prove it!) So can anyone give me any further advice? teh drive is an ibm deskstar (SP?) scsi 17+ gig the scsi system is supported (BTlogic scsi3 ) I have tried chopping it into smaller partitions or just letting it go w/ the suse chosen ones .. formatted w/ Pqmagic adn w/ suse neither seem to make a difference. the main chip is athlon/600 there is 615megs ram on the thing and a nvidia tnt2 which doesn't "seem" to be giving any problmes ( I haven't been able to stress it as whatever the problme is w/ hte install/drive/ I dontknow wtf the problme is problem hasn't allowed me to do anything constructive, like WORK on my own material.. Q2) on any compuer in this home net that has or had w2k installed after 7.3 is installed ( lilo is boot manager-ing ) any time a boot into windows happens, when it is time to reboot back into suse ... the "this disk wasn't shut down cleanly" message comes up and it runs its "required" files system checks. Is it that Windows isn't actually shutting down cleanly , or is there something else happening? .. And as w2k WAS origionally installed on the computer I complain about in the first question .. can that have ANY relation to the current dificulties , even tho I reformatted several times over ? ( w/ Suses "fdisk" for 7.2 and later 7.3 ..) or ( alternative number 42 ( and my own personal fave... it doesn't matter and none of this is really happening! <G> help please ... before I lose teh rest of my good Karma points ! ( I have bruned a LOT of it this past week! <G>) TIA -- j afterthought : A fool and his money ... Hey! Where's my wallet?!