Defective kernel

[SnagaDuath]

Hello...

okay...so i was working on my pc today doing nothing out of the ordinary when suddenly everything got really slow...i closed my browser and everything seemed fine again until i opened another program and everything slowed down again...so i figured i'd reboot and see if that fixes it. So i reboot the pc and i get a "defective linux kernel detected..." warning during bootup Then when run level 5 is reached my monitor goes blank

So i shut down with the power button on my case, start up again and try safe mode...i get the same defective kernel warning, but i get into comand line without other problems...but when i run "# init 5" my monitor goes blank again...

I had a free partition, so i just installed windows and it already sucks

Can someone please help me?? Is there a way to fix the kernel without having to reinstall linux completely...or am i as screwed as i think?

thx...

EDIT: I'm running suse10.2, forgot to mention that earlier...

[gogalthorp]

You will need to reinstall at least the root partition. If you did a standard install the /home is on a separate partition. When you get to the place to decide on partions you want your existing root (/) partition to be reformatted but leave the /home partion alone this will preserve your personal settings and data.
note you will have to reinstall any drivers ie video etc and reinstall any programs that reside on the root and not in the home

The problem is most likely a bad disk sector. So before reinstalling you should get a low level disk scanning app. I recommend SpinRight but it is not a free program though the best I know of for finding and correcting low level disk errors. You should also be able to get something from the drive manufacturer.

[SnagaDuath]

Thanks gogalthorp!

I scanned my drive using seatools (found on seagate's site), but it revealed no errors with the drive, so i'm still a bit confused as to what exactly happened.

i think i'll just format the whole drive and upgrade to suse 10.3....