(this was my reply to the first msg in this thread, but smtp errors delayed it, bah. Should still be relevant ;) Getting SuSE 9.3 (or similar) to read paritioning info from an /etc/fstab you've just created on a freshly-formatted disk... You need some extra stuff other than an /etc/fstab file for suse to recognise it as a root partition. By reading some of the autoyast scripts, and experimenting, I found I needed: /bin/bash, in the correct executable format for that architecture. ie, 64 bit for amd64 machines, 32 bit for anything else. Directories for mount points. You'll at least need to make /proc, and probably more for any extra partitions you have listed in fstab. I had a second extra partition mounted as /scratch, which I needed to make a directory for. I'm guessing you'll need to make them for things like /var as well... Good luck, Tom Scholl