0x10 error; the /home of a MDK to appear "magically" in the /ect/fstab of a Debian ?

[Alain Reinhardt <reinhardt@free.fr>]

Allo,

CONTEXT

I work with a Debian which takes half the partitions of a disk, and my
daughters surf along with a Mandrake that takes the other half of the
partitions on the same disk.

I boot normally from hard drive with /dev/sda2 mounted as /.  They were, up
to a few days ago, booting from floppy with /dev/sda1 mounted as /.

We shared some partitions, that is : /dev/sda3-ext2 mounted as /espace on that
same hard disk, and /dev/sdb2-ext2 mounted as /ziplinux and /dev/sdb4-fat
mounted as /zipdos on a zip drive.

I recently transfered a lot of stuff between our respective partitions using
those shared partitions.  I have also copied a lot on floppies.  At one point,
the Mandrake requested fsck on the zip and maybe other partitions, and I
answered yes to all question asked by this utility program.

I dont know if it is related, but I cannot boot the Mandrake from the floppy
no more.  At boot, just after loading of the linux label or rescue label, I get
an 0x10 error message (I have also seen 0x80 at one point.

QUESTIONS

Question 1 : is it fatal ?
Question 2 : What matters most are the documents of my daughters.  How then
can I have the partition /dev/sda11 which is the /home of their Mandrake distrib
appear "magically" in the /etc/fstab of my Debian ?
Question 3 : If I reinstall either my Debian or their Mandrake, can I still recover my old or
their old /home, /usr/local... ?

Thanks for your precisious help.  At this point, I feel "broken" because I can't
find a solution in my readings and I am wearing out.

Alain