There seems to be a residual problem in my system, though apparently unrelated to the swapping of the HDs that was the subject of the earlier problem. After the corruption in BIOS and /boot was resolved, the last step was to run fsck again on the /home partition, after which the system booted and performed properly. That last step had to be repeated for the next few boot, after which the system sometimes booted normally, and sometimes needed the fsck step. In the latter case, after the herald screen (the chameleon alone), the repair screen appears, reporting an inconsistency, automatic fsck fails, and it asks for fsck to be run manually. After fsck finishes, its report includes (these are numbers from a few days ago): "/dev/sda7/:21727/2564096 files (0.7% non-contiguous 1982750/10241429 blocks". I interpret this as meaning that there are bad blocks on the HD. For a few days, when fsck was needed, in both number pairs the first number is smaller with every boot. This suggested that the filesystem (ext4) was repairing itself gradually by marking the bad blocks. That changed day before yesterday, and the first numbers of the two pairs is now successively larger, so assuming that my interpretation is correct, the HD is going to hell. In fact, one application (a Java program) has become corrupted, and I assume this is a manifestation of the same deterioration. Everything else that I have been using seems so far to be functioning correctly. I think I need to replace the HD and reinstall v11.3 anew. I have backups of most data, with the excption of some of the Kmail message files. These are organized in folders that I can copy from the .kde4 tree. Any advice or comment beyond that will be gratefully received. -- Stan Goodman Qiryat Tiv'on Israel -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org