I boot and get: L40 40 40 40 40...

["Seneca Cunningham" <seneca@slemish.com>]

I have just been rearranging all my partitions, and now it looks like the
most recent change is messing my system. A shortened version of the first
couple post-post lines is:

	L 40 40 40 40 40 40 40 40 40 40 40 40 40 40 40 40 40 40 40 40
       40 40 40 40 40 40 40 40 40 40 40 40 40 40 40 40 40 40 40 40

These lines continue not to the point of ad nauseum, but to the point of
infinity. I can boot into my DOS partition with a boot disk, but I can't use
the boot disk that I make earlier for my kernel (a custom compilation of
2.4.16), the partitions have been changed.

I can't alter the settings on my boot floppy as the system with the problem
is the only linux system that I have any access to.

My system is a combination of potato, woody, and sid, that is mostly woody.
The original partitions were somewhere along the lines of:

	/dev/hda1	FAT16		1000M
	/dev/hda3	Linux ext2	800M
	/dev/hda2	Linux swap	200M

The altered partitions are something like:

	/dev/hda1	FAT16		100M
	/dev/hda2	Linux ext2	900M		(this is /usr)
	/dev/hda5	Linux ext2	200M		(this is /)
	/dev/hda6	Linux ext2	200M
	/dev/hda7	Linux ext2	200M
	/dev/hda8	Linux ext2	200M
	/dev/hda4	Linux swap	100M

The problem did not happen after partitioning, or shifting the files from
the old hda3 to the newer hda2, 5-8. It happened after I relocated files
from what would now be /usr/usr to /usr.

I had had some problems with this process earlier on, all being corrected
within minutes.

To my very untrained eye, it looks like some crucial file was corrupted in
that final move (why is it _always_ the last change that kills the system).

Do you know of any way to fix this without reinstalling the entire system?
The only way I can do any installation is by floppy.

Thanks for any help,

Seneca
seneca@slemish.com