hanging on bootup: scanning for harddisk partitions

[rwcitek]

With Knoppix 3.2 there where no problems. The harddisk was fully accessable.
The contents of /proc/partitions was:

major minor  #blocks  name

   3     0   14749056 hda
   3     1    6160896 hda1
   3     2          1 hda2
   3     5    5630751 hda5
   3     6    2955928 hda6

If I understand you correctly, the above was created with Knoppix 3.2. However ...

With later versions of Knoppix I have problems with accessing my harddisk
with 3.8 and 3.9 knoppix hang by booting on: "scanning for Harddisk partitions and creating /etc/fstab..."

... you were not even able to get to a shell with Knoppix 3.8 or 3.9. Is that correct?

Hopefully there is an option by booting

Probably. Your partitions do not look out of the ordinary. So, I suspect it may be something other than your harddrive, but that's just a guess.

To troubleshoot this, let's stick with Knoppix 3.8 for now. Try booting with boot: knoppix debug -b 3 Using that boot command will cause Knoppix to pause at various stages in the boot process. Just type 'exit' at each shell prompt to move on to the next stage. You will know that you are at the final stage when typing 'exit' does not do anything. If you get that far, type 'init 5' to go into graphics mode.

How far do you get?

Regards,
- Robert
http://www.cwelug.org/