Thank you for your efforts Chris and Dan. The problem is solved and the failure was most peculiar: My harddisk looks like this (at the moment...:-): Win98 2,7GB /hda1 /boot (Debian) 40MB /hda3 /boot (SuSE) 40MB /hda4 / SuSE 6,5GB /hda5 swap both 133,3MB /hda6 swap both 133,3MB /hda7 / (Debian) 3,5GB /hda8 When I took a look at SuSE's /etc/fstab file from inside Debian I noticed that the swap partition /hda6 was labelled /hda5 (!) same as the / partition which is totally nuts (at that moment swap /hda7 wasn't registered either in SuSE). Cheers, ei