Sorry to bug everyone again.. but I think im on crack... fedora core 3 yum.conf : <snip> baseurl=file://storage/fedora/3/base <snip> actual path: /storage/fedora/3/base (there is repodata here with xmls) when yum is run: file://storage/fedora/3/base/repodata/repomd.xml: [Errno 5] OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/fedora/3/base/repodata/repomd.xml' it looks like it cuts it off .. I have tried multiple methods in the path.. all not working..What am i doing wrong ? am I on bushels of crack ?