Hello, and apologies if this is an inappropriate forum for this post. I'll try and be as brief as possible in describing my computer problems, as they have been going on for some time now:

I have a laptop (IBM thinkpad T22, 900Mhz 256 RAM), which had XP on it. Some months ago, out of the blue, it froze during boot-up (progress bar stopped moving). I could boot-up in safe mode, and access hdd etc. Without pausing to think (my usual problem!) I whipped my XP disk into the machine and before I knew it was in the process of re-installing XP. A mistake, as during the installation got the same boot-up freeze, and could no longer do a safe mode boot-up. Put windows 98 SE disk in, booted from this, tried "fdisk /mbr", got the "abort, retry fail" message!

So, knoppix time: put my trusty knoppix CD in (forget the version, but was prior to 3.9), and... also failed. Machine froze at the "autoconfiguring devices" bit. Tried all the failsafe boot-up options etc, same problem every time.

Next, went into BIOS (could read hdd no problems), tried the Ultimate Boot cd (UBCD), ran diagnostic on hdd, was ok. Swapped out hdd for other drive, same problems.

Then, downloaded the knoppix 3.9 CD, and it worked fine! Everything was ok, could access the hdd. Breathed a sigh of relief, whipped my wedding photos off the drive, did nothing until saw that there was now a dvd knoppix, with R on it (am statistician, so this meant could again use laptop for work). Knoppix DVD 4.02 works great. Decided no need to go back to xp ever, and thought I'd try installing suse linux 10.0 (naively believing all problems would be gone with a recent linux installation). But suse linux installation also froze, after the first screen (if you are familiar, choose installation from menu, it then loads linux kernel, next screen after that was the freeze).

At this point, used ubcd to completely wipe hdd and boot sector. No help. Realised I could no longer access hdd in knoppix, instead got message "Could not mount device, The reported error was, mount mount point /mnt/hda1 does not exist".
In knoppix, (probably shouldn't have done this, but figured what further harm could happen?!), as root ran "fdisk /dev/hda"
chose to write a new partition, primary, default settings for first and last cylinder, the whole lot. There was a warning for this: "Warning: invalid flag 0x0000 of partition table 4 will be corrected by w(rite)". I w(rote). Still couldn't access hdd. Finally, tried "mkfs.ext2 -c /dev/hda1". This didn't complain, but mentioned 752 bad blocks, anyway, rebooted, tried to mount hdd and got different error: "mount wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hda1, missing codepage or other error". Followed advice to check for more info using "dmesg | tail", got lots but error stuff seemed to be: "NTFS-fs error (device hda1): read_ntfs_boot_sector(): Primary boot sector is invalid. NTFS-fs error (device hda1): read_ntfs_boot_sector(): Mount option error=recover not used. Aborting without trying to recover. NTFS-fs error (device hda1): ntfs_fill_super(): Not an NTFS volume."

Anyone still here will have realised I don't know much and am just blundering along. Any ideas as to what the problem is would be great, and ideas on how to fix it and I will be over the moon!!

Cheers,
Rob.