Posted 07 October 2004 - 06:33 PM
Yah; the "sda4" is highly suspect. The nomenclature for Linux drives is as follows:
/dev/[1]d[2][3]
where
[1] = type of disk, usually "s" or "h", where the s is for SCSI and the h is for "hard disk" (meaning IDE, or even MFM and RLL, but those days are long over)
[2] = which disk (starting from a). For example, the third SCSI disk in your chain would be "sdc"; the master drive in your second IDE chain (even if it were the only IDE drive in your box) would be "hdc"
[3] = which partition (starting from 1). So, your first four (the primary) partitions would be 1-4, and your extended would be 5-8.
So, to hear that your computer's trying to access sda4 means that it's trying to access the fourth partition of your primary SCSI disk. Since it's a notebook, it's -real- unlikely that it's SCSI. Which means that something went FUBAR during install. I'd try installing again -- maybe use Knoppix (www.knoppix.com) with their knx2hd command; regardless, your XP is still there, it just needs to be "found" by the bootloader (grub and LILO are the two bootloaders commonly used these days with Linux).
Good luck!