The latest fresh installation on 04JUL04 is finally starting to crash. I did absolutely no updates via YOU (or any other means) because of the known fact that SuSE will stop working correctly immediately following said update. I did a complete backup --using DAR-- after learning of it & installing. Perhaps even that is not good enough: (1)every 3rd boot, w/o fail, SuSE hangs on either 'scanning hardware' or 'loading name cache server daemon'. Attempts to disable same cause it to lock up just before those things would ordinarily load. (This cleared up, inexplicably, for awhile, then after a couple weeks was back.) (2)as I already noted, the cdrecorder stopped mounting as of last evening --despite the fact that nothing has been modified on this system since my initial backup of 27JUL04. It worked, so I didn't fix. (3)the RPM database seemingly had a mind of its own & had to be rebuilt several times; the latest time I also had to initialize it. (4)RP10 installation worked, but not on any other media type than RP8 --despite numerous codecs included that weren't in RP8 For all those reasons, combined, I decided I would probably have to do another fresh install & start from scratch --but I decided to try recovery, first. (1)I booted into Resuce mode, formatted /dev/hda1 & tried a chroot & was met w/failure each & every time --though I am practiced in Gentoo, SuSE apparently is different in that regard...? (2)I attempted running 'dar_static' from there, but no go so... (3)I did a minimum installation via CD --YES! the CD mounted & worked! (4)I booted the system & it locked up at the 'loading name cache server daemon' so I rebooted (5)logging in, I ran dar_static & recovered the entire /dev/hda1 partition (a.k.a., 'root') (6)I booted, logged in, and immediately attempted to mount /dev/cdrom using the desktop icon. No go. (7)I changed the fstab by removing existing lines pointing to the cdrom & created my own --the cdrom mounted --until I rebooted, then it quit, no matter what is in fstab. So.... I now am pretty much at a loss as to what has happened. I know this is an epistle but am attempting to give complete info. The logs show nothing on any of this. Am I truly frelled? -- ..."Yogi" CH Namasté Yoga Studio "If music be the food of love, why can't rabbits sing?"