The dangers of kernel upgrades have been well illustrated lately. The install CD's option "boot installed system" could help. It gives you a system with root mounted normally, avoiding all mucking around with mnt and chroot. But it has a problem, it always runs the original default kernel. If your machine uses a different kernel (eg: smp) or if you have upgraded to a newer kernel then you won't have the right modules. ( Note to SuSE: Why not? Put the original default modules in place permanently, and "boot installed system" would work properly! ) Anyhow, as is "Boot Installed System" will boot without networking! Bummer, a lot less useful. Another preparation is to put your network driver inside initrd (the pre-boot-root-image) while you still have a good system. To do this run "lsmod" to list your modules and work out which one(s) are necessary for networking. Edit /etc/sysconfig/kernel and include them in INITRD_MODULES eg: INITRD_MODULES="reiserfs e100" Run mkinitrd. Now make a copy of that kernel and its initrd and set them up as an option in grub. This means that as long as you keep those copies of the old kernel (vmlinuz) and its initrd, you can boot to a machine with networking. With networking, it is easier get back, you can download and re-install an older working kernel (and corresponding modules). The only downside is that /boot/initrd will be a touch larger. michaelj -- Michael James michael.james@csiro.au System Administrator voice: 02 6246 5040 CSIRO Bioinformatics Facility fax: 02 6246 5166