I just had an almost identical experience with a fresh xubuntu install on a dual boot set up with win98.
I had edited /etc/fstab to create a mount to a shared vfat partition which among other things contained my Acronis True Image disc image files in .tib format. True Image splits the image into a set of linked files each being the maximum size for a fat32 partition. (I did wonder whether the problem related to the way True Image creates this linked set rather than the file size). The fstab line I added was : /dev/hda5 /media/hda5 vfat defaults,umask=000 0 2 thus setting the fsck option to check this vfat partition. On re-booting when it got to the file system checking part of the boot- up sequence a mismatch between the nominal size of the first .tib file in the set and its actual size on the disc caused it to truncate the file to 0 bytes. The boot-up sequence then hung before it could start on anything else and I killed it. I edited the fsck option to 0, recreated my image files and tried booting up xubuntu. So far it hasn't eaten my .tib files again :) -- fsck.vfat truncates files of 4294967295 bytes length to 0 bytes at boot-time https://launchpad.net/bugs/62831 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
