off topic: hardware advice

[Kirk Wood]

Actually it doesn't rule that out at all. Often times a person has some
cluster problems. Then they either have them marked by scan disk or do a
format. Then the drive has more clusters go bad. Then more clusters go
bad. Before long major chunks of the drive are gone. This is actually
quite frequent. If a person has a bad cluster marked I always recomend
running a through scan on the drive every week for a month. Often the
first couple are the warning of the drives impending failure.

Like I have said on list, I have seen this kind of thing caused by
something on the motherboard only once or twice. It is so rare that I
never go to that until all other possibilities are investigated.

If he was running windows I could give him information on finding where
in the boot process the problem was occuring. (By causing the system to
log the boots.) I am sure the same can be done in Linux, but don't know
how or how to prevent overwriting so you can go and look later.

=======
Kirk Wood
Cpt.Kirk at 1tree.net

The mind is like a parachute; it works much better when open.
If your too open minded, your brains will fall out.