Strange Things Happening

[guns90]

Hello, everyone. I'm having a problem and don't have a clue as to what is causing it. I changed distros from ubuntu 8.10 to Linux MInt 6 when I first noticed this. I have reformatted all three of my hard drives, reinstalled Windows on hd0, and done several reinstalls/removals (ubuntu 8.10, PCLinuxOS 2009.1, Fedora 10, and Linux Mint 6). I currently have Windows on hd0, Linux MInt 6 on hd1, and hd2 has been deleted with Gparted and is unallocateed.

When I boot up, sometimes it boots perfectly and works perfectly. Other times it boots into the grub menu page, goes into the 'loading page', then as it goes blank to come up with the login page, it gives me the following and locks up with a blinking cursor:

Starting up...
[ 0.004000] Aperture beyond 4 GB. Ignoring.
Loading, please wait...
Gave up waiting for root device. Common problems:
-boot args (cat /proc/cmdline)
-Check rootdelay=(did the system wait long enough?)
-Check root=(did the system wait for the right device?)D
Missing modules (cat /proc/modules; ls /dev)
ALERT! /dev/sdb1 does not exist. Dropping to a shell!

BusyBox v1.10.2 (Ubuntu 1:1.10.2-1ubuntu7) built-in shell (ash)

Enter 'help for a list of built-in commands.

(initramfs)_(...and this is where everything is locked up and the cursor will blink forever.)

I can push the reset button to reboot and maybe it'll do this two or three times, then boot-up and work fine, or maybe it will just start working fine and do fine for the next two or three boots.

Even MORE bizzar, when I run fdisk -l in the terminal, I get:

gary@gary-desktop ~ $ fdisk -l
Cannot open /dev/sda
Cannot open /dev/sdb
Cannot open /dev/sdg

WHAT DOES THAT MEAN??

I have even switched the cables on the sata drives so that hd1 and hd2 were in different places, deleted everything, reformatted everything, reinstalled everything and got the same thing. I know nothing about hardware, but I'm guessing the motherboard is on its way out.

Is anyone familiar with these error comments? I would appreciate it very much if someone knew what was going on. Thanks. Gary

ASUS M2N32-SLI Premium Vista Edition
AMD Athlon 64 x 2 Dual Core 6400+
2GB Corsair DDR2
EGVA 8800 GTS Graphics
320GB Seagate hd0
320GB Western Digital hd1
160GB Western Digital hd2

[Husse]

Well you need to use sudo with fdisk or you get that permission error
It's really strange that you get it sometimes but you did not say if any disk is external
Because if that's the case I think this is the problem
http://www.linuxmint.com/wiki/index.php ... annot_boot

[Akanbe]

Ah, I have the same problem, but with slightly different text (but all the basic stuff is still there). I have 1 IDE disk and 1 Sata disk (sda) and when Mint loads, even though the partition is on sdb3 it doesn't seem to want to load.

I tried messing around with boot/grub/device.map and menu.lst but I don't have permission to write to either of them . Please let me know if you find some way to make it work, Guns90.

[Husse]

Rereading this makes me fairly certain that the problem you have guns90 indeed is the one in the link I gave above
@ Akanbe
Don't "mess around" with important files - try to find out what to do first
I'm not sure I should tell you this considering "mess around" but you need to be root (gksu gedit preferably)
First read the wiki to get some basic understanding
http://www.linuxmint.com/wiki/index.php ... annot_boot