On Wednesday 02 April 2008 01:07, Les Mikesell wrote: > First cut - in your recovery shell, comment out /home from /etc/fstab > and see if you can come up without it (log in as root, of course). That > will at least give you a fairly normal environment to try to figure out > why the md1 device is getting assembled but the /dev/md1 node isn't > created for it. Thanks Les, that was very helpful (and I should have thought of it...). But then it gets weird again: I commented out the /dev/md1 line and the system came all the way up to the login prompt. Great! I thought. Enter the root password and... kingkong login: root Password: xxxxxx Last login: Tue Dec 3 13:58:11 2002 /bin/bash: Permission denied doh! well of course I have done nothing special to the permissions there or anywhere else. I can see all the console boot messages and they all look normal. Booted into single user mode, and that works. /bin/bash has normal perms and all seems well. What's more, I was able to mount /dev/md1 on /home and it didn't complain. Then I un-commented the line in fstab, rebooted and it worked all the way up to the login prompt, it now uses all 3 md devices happily. But then, "Permission denied" is all I get. Nice system but it makes it hard to maintain when even root can't log in. Could there be some disk error? I have never had so much bizarre behavior from one system. Ready to chuck it out the window. Is there anything else I can try to see what's up?