As soon as I use a kernel with ext3 support boot up freezes with: "Partition Check: /dev/bus/etc/with/ide/bus" I am trying to make doublely sure that it is ext3 causing the problem by removing the journals I added to the original ext2 filesystems using "tune2fs -j /dev/hda1" ( / & /usr are ext3 while hda2 is swap by the way) Unfortunately I'm having trouble find a rescue disk that supports ext3 / e2fs tools that will boot; I have a scsi cdrom that cannot be booted from. What causes the partituion check to crash the whole system? Even a soft reset is impossible. I have made correct initrd entries in lilo.conf and tried a kernel that doesn't require them too.
