On Sat, 10 Aug 2002, Mitchell Smith wrote: > This is generally caused by a system not shutting down correctly or > something else that causes the integrity of your file system to become > unstable. > This is an important point worth reinforcing. Be sure that you are shutting down properly to the extent possible. Since you seem to have lost or forgotten your root password, it's very likely that you haven't been doing that. Not shutting down properly will eventually cause the behavior you report. There's a lovely little trick that can help you shutdown properly without logging in as root and typing "shutdown -r now" which goes like this: First, login as root and edit the file /etc/inittab with your favorite editor. There's a line in there that looks something like this: ca::ctrlaltdel:/sbin/shutdown -t3 -r now Just change the "-r" to a "-h" Thereafter, you can shutdown with Ctrl-Alt-Del