[Sheflug] poss dual boot problem

["Rob Miller" <nospam [at] ntlworld.com>]

Hi All,
I have a dual boot system with Win98 and SuSE 7.0 Pro installed on a 10 Gig
hard disk with roughly 5 Gigs for each O.S. I have a LILO boot floppy to
boot the PC into Linux.

Last night whilst booted into Linux the hard disk started to make unhealthy
noises - if anyone is familiar with 'water hammer' then I'd describe the
sound my HD was making as 'disk hammer' - sounded like it was repeatedly
attempting to access the disk. Everything carried on running OK so I thought
nothing of it and powered down (I'm not yet familiar with what constitutes
abnormal disk behaviour in Linux :-\

This morning when trying to boot into Win98 I got the same 'hammer'
accessing of the HD. I was then told that there was a fault on the hard disk
and the boot routine went off looking for a network boot or bootable CD or
floppy.

I tried booting with a 98 boot disk but got 'drive not ready' error when I
tried to run 'scandisk C:'

I then tried booting from my LILO floppy disk but just got the scrolling
screen of 1's and 0's (or is it L's and I's and O's?) that I've seen before
when LILO can't find a boot sector.

I then tried booting from the SuSE installation CD - running YAST2 and
requesting 'update' to see if I could access the hard disk this way.

Good news! Selecting 'Boot System' worked and I was able to log in
successfully.
The only questionable thing I noticed during the boot up was a message
something like

"maximum number of mount points exceeded - check forced"

After all that my question is - Do dual boot Win and Linux systems generally
affect each other adversely in this way or is this a sign that my disk or
disk controller is on the way out?

I had a look in the 'system - information' menu on the desk top but couldn't
see anything that was obviously wrong. Everything seems to be running fine
now but I'm a little aprehensive...

any help apprecitated - especially house keeping tools that can tell me if
my Linux installation is cleaning up after itself properly.

Cheers
Rob

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