Hi John
Subject: [Alug] Crying Wolf I would be grateful however if someone can hazard a guess at why the programmes on my first hard drive seem to be either self destructing or slowly dieing, a bit at a time?
A stab in the dark : I had a similar problem once where I had 64Mb of memory installed and Linux 'thought' I had 128 Mb installed. View /etc/lilo.conf and check for : append = "mem=XXX" where XXX is a value representing how much memory is installed, eg. if you have 128MB of memory the line should read : append = "mem=128M" if it reads more than you have then you have a problem anyway, regardless of whether this is the cause of this particular problem (As Linus Torvalds puts it "Bad things will happen"). The Linux Kernel addresses up to 64Mb of memory by default so up to that amount you should be safe (though I do remember reading somewhere that its always safer to specify exactly how much even if less than 64Mb). If you have >64Mb installed but there is no line in lilo.conf you will only address the 1st 64Mb. So you would need to add a line to address the full memory : Here is a dump from mine : ---------snip----------- boot = /dev/hda timeout = 50 linear prompt default = linux vga = normal read-only map=/boot/map install=/boot/boot.b image = /boot/vmlinuz-2.2.19.0 label = linux append = "mem=128M" root = /dev/hda1 ---------snip----------- The " append = " bit is merely passing the value as a parameter to the kernel at boot time. Hope this helps anyway, will continue to rack brains for other possible causes... Regards Earl