[solved Although Not Fixed ... ] Boot Problems (swap Partition)?

I've installed openSUSE on an external HDD to familiarize myself and play around with it (sorry, am a relative Linux newbie).

After picking the "Restart" > "openSUSE 10.3" menu from the shutdown dialogue, I now have problems getting the installation running again. GRUB starts up fine, and openSUSE also begins to boot, but it then stops. I posted the last few lines of the output below. My hardware setup is as follows: (a) Windows on internal HDD; (B) openSUSE on external HDD partition 2; © SWAP partition on external HDD partition 1.

Please help!

=== Output ===

...
sd 2:0:0:0 [sdb] Attached SCSI disk
.ok
fsck 1.40.2 (12-Jul-2001)
fsck: fsck.swap: not found
fsck: Error 2 while executing fsck.swap for /dev/disk/by-id\usb-TOSHIBA_MK3017GAP_DEF19894A28-0:0-part 1
fsck succeeded: Mounting root device read-write
Mounting root /dev/disk/disk/by-id\usb-TOSHIBA_MK3017GAP_DEF19894A28-0:0-part 1
mount: unknown filesystem type 'swap'
could not mount root filesystem -- exiting to /bin/sh
sh: no job control in this shell

Something is screwy about your fstab, it's trying to mount both the root and the swap partiton. Swap partitions aren't mounted in the normal sense, they are just activated. Short of booting up with a rescue disk to look at fstab which is on the disk it's trying to mount, in your place I would just cut my losses and do a reinstall.

You could try entering the rescue system on the CD/DVD to see if will repair the mistake.

Passing thought: Have the external drive plugged in and switched on before booting the computer and not plug it in after booting off the DVD install disk or else computer might get confused. And then always operate with external drive on before the computer.

1. Did you format your assumed swap partition as swap when installing?
2. Your /etc/fstab entry should look like the following

/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_Hitachi_HTS5412_HP2400BEGEZGSA-part6 swap swap defaults 0 0
- for swap partition and

/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_Hitachi_HTS5412_HP2400BEGEZGSA-part7 / reiserfs acl,user_xattr 1 1
- for root partition

It is also ok to change /dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_Hitachi_HTS5412_HP2400BEGEZGSA-part6 to /dev/sda6 in case you know the name of device file (the name of device file could be learned from partitioner during installation or with mount command if you login into your system somehow

3. If you have RAM memory in your computer (and this is the thing you obviously should have ) than swap is recommended (if RAM is less then 1,5-2 GB) but not obligatory for linux boot. That means that to check the real problem and to at least boot your system you could try switching swap off. This is done by editing /etc/fstab - put # in front of the line about swap. DO NOT FORGET TO MAKE A BACKUP of fstab at first. "cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.bkp". To edit fstab you will need to start "Rescue system" from installation cd and then mount your root partition. Example:
mount /dev/hdd1 /mnt
if you do not know what is the device file of your root partition try "mount /dev/s" and then press Tab twice - it will give you a full list. Than just try to guess.

Good luck

Hey everyone:

Thanks for all your help. Unfortunately I got no clue what the problem was and went with ken_yap's advice -- backing up my data and reinstalling. But thanks anyway ...

Having to reinstall is, of course, a bit annoying, but I have to admit KDE makes it very easy to backup your data. Everything is back running fine in just an hour's time!

Cheers

**** ludens