Mandrake 10.1 Boot Problems, Please Help

I have 3 Hard Drives

1x Raptor 36 gig
2x 160 Gig IDE

I have win xp installed on the sata raptor, and I installed linux on a 10 gig partition of one of the IDE's...I have changed my hard drive boot sequence to the one with linux being primary boot...so that works fine, it boots up and I can choose linux, linux safe, windows etc...

The problem is when I boot linux, i get the error:

/dev/sda1/ is not a valid block device

I _can_ boot into the linux os after this message if i press the i key at the right time when booting, and it seems fine....it's just not a very convenient way to get into an os (randomly hitting the keyboard :haha: )

So can anyone help? I think maybe if I can just get linux to completely ignore the raptor (sata, xp device) then it will boot fine...and this will work better anyway because I could do without any interactive between my linux and xp hard drives....don't want them to start a fight or anything huh :)

thanks for reading :hotouch:

Most likely Linux is trying to mount your Windows partition but fails for some reason.

Look in /etc/fstab and comment out (add # in the beginning of the line) those lines that refer to your SATA drive (/dev/sda).