OK, the system is back to life... I re-installed libz as Felix suggested, rebuilt initrd (using mkinitrd), all under chroot in rescue system, and verified that libz.so is still in /usr/local/lib in initrd. Then (wild guess) I moved the libz files in real system from /usr/loca/lib to spare location and re-created initrd with mkinitrd - and voila, libz is in /lib64 and the system is bootable again /usr/local/lib is in ld.so.conf, so probably mkinitrd saw the newer version of the libz there and copied it. I'll check later how this newer version got installed (I see the date)... Thanks to you all for your help. BR -- Mark Goldstein -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org