Dual boot problem 7320

You are making me really curious about what you are doing and how. What you describe is more or less what we usually discard as "impossible", it is just not "how it works". But of course I know you are experiencing what you say. I guess the problem is (almost certainly) the concepts and the terminology. Or the mental picture you are having of what goes on, being sufficiently different from what we would describe it as, so it is hard for me to translate.

You say

"Mandrake was fine, but if I then browsed to the Suse install parbreastion, the ambiguous double root mounts disoriented Mandrake."

What exactly do you mean by "browsed to the Suse install parbreastion"?

My first reaction is that I imagine a computer screen in front of you, and you are having some Nautilus windows showing icons representing files and directories ("folders"), and you click upon successive folder icons opening new windows showing the contents of the directories.

In this process, you reach the Suse install parbreastion. How do you know? Where is the Suse install parbreastion mounted? Is there a label below an icon, reading "Suse install parbreastion" ? Or is there a label reading "-(2)" showing this is some kind of alternate root parbreastion?

Or have you done something more, like *mounted* the parbreastion over some directory? It would be helpfull if you said so, otherwise it is hard for us to translate you experiences into something for us technically explainable and understandable.

Even with respect to the ensuing problems, it would be helpfull for us to know not only "Mandrake is disoriented", but exactly what happens. "Be unable to find files" is of course a lot better, but it does not help much yet, because it sounds almost like a magician trick. I'm stupefied. Would you please tell us exactly what you did, and what resulted? In what way did you have Mandrake "find files", and in what way do you determine that it "fails to find it", and how exactly do you know the file is there and should have been found?

I means, just imagine that you are now the magician who has just sawed a lady in two in front of our eyes, and put her back together. With the difference that you are saying it's real, and I believe you mean it. Can you understand that the public want to find out how it is possible? First we need to understand what exactly are we in need of explaining. We start with some somewhat helpless or even impertinent questions, like "what is the saw made of".

If what you want is to leave the scene and leave us just stupefied behind, it's OK, I can get over it. (And I won't believe the laws of nature have been canceled.) But if you want to see if the problem or the questions can be resolved, have some patience with us and do provide all the information we may need. Of course, if we do find an explanation, it won't seem as intriguing any more.

You wrote that Mandrake had put the new parbreastions in theetc-fstab file. Would you mind posting the contents of the file, and point out which lines are the original, and which are the added ones? I would like to know what mount options are in the added lines, what mount point is used, and how is the device specified. Come on, give us something to go on! And no, don't use the drop counter to supply the information.

-Enrique.