Dear list, thanks to a pointer by Jerry Feldman (thanks!) I found out that what made my hard diic grate during boot was indeed the swap partition. To solve the problem, i tried refomatting the sawp partition, but could not find any way to do that (I have SuSE 8.0), neither in Yast nor with command line tools. I tried deleting the swap and recreating it as a reiserfs partition, in yast, iand always got an "fdisk failed" error. After several tries, i decided to "continue" instead of "reboot", and i had an extra reiserfs partition and no grinding. When i deleted that partition and put the swap back in, though (again after several fdisk failures), i got the same grinding back. What i was going to do now, is to delete swap once and for all and never touch my partition table again, but i would like to be sure nothing else is going wrong wth my hard disk. So i would like to know: 1. is there something like "scandisk" under linux (sorry for the "MSism"!) that checks the *surface* of the partition? 2. how can i reformat the swap filesystem (if there is such a thing)? thanks again to all in advance! federico