Thanks to all who responded to my problem to a mountable but non-bootable root partition.
The answer is that dselect's aborted install (upgrade) apparently deleted files in /lib before replacements were made. Restoring the /lib directory from tape allowed the system to boot hda3 properly. Best Regards for the New Year to All! JohnT <!-- Life is non-orthogonal and big endian. -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]