Adam & Karsten, thanks very much for your postings. i am a fool for not backing up better - i suppose i was waiting to buy a CD writer but didn't want to spend.
anyway hints from your emails gave me enough to go on. i ran fsck to repair. you also mentioned libraries which i looked into, and sure enough the contents to lib had been moved! so i'm sorry to say i was obviously wrong - i had not deleted the root (i don't think anyway) but somehow the essential system libraries had been moved and hence 'ls' and other command did not work. i would not have been able to do this without your promt help. thank you very much. regards tom
