I am running CentOS 5/2 (latest updates) with the GNOME DE on a 32-bit machine (at work). I have k3b installed, and I was trying to copy a DVD earlier this morning, but k3b said it couldn't read encrypted DVDs. So, I installed libdvdcss from rpmforge and restarted k3b. It hung the system. I rebooted, and / had been damaged. After running e2fsck from the repair prompt, I rebooted and a whole slew of errors revolving around various /var directories that did not ecist occurred. I have been trying to repair /var, and so far with a fair modicum of success, but I've hit an interesting wall - two, actually. 1) The gdm refuses to come up. It claims that "Server Authorization directory (daemon/ServAuthDir) is set to /var/gdm, but this does not exist...." However: # ll -d /var/gdm drwxrwx--T 2 root gdm 4096 Dec 11 10:31 /var/gdm # ll /var/gdm total 8 -rw-r----- 1 root root 45 Nov 26 10:47 :0.Xauth -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 63 Dec 11 09:14 :0.Xservers This is identical to my backup system (which is not surprising - I set up the dir and copied the files from here - was that a bad idea?). 2) The following daemons fail to start: auditd, NFS statd, avahi and HAL. I've tried to pin down why the avahi daemon won't start because it keeps logging permissions errors trying to create the pid file /var/run/avahi-daemon//pid, but the setup of /var /var/run and /var/run/avahi-daemon are all identical to this (backup) machine. Any suggestions? Or is there a better, more comprehensive repair facility available? BTW, OT: Does anyone know why this might have happened? I have all this installed at home, no problems whatsoever (libdvdcss works seamlessly with all my DVD tools, including k3b). Thanks! mhr