Hi, I posted a message about my Partition Screw-up. Thanks to those who replied.
I have the system booting off floppy. I worked out that I needd to recreate /lib/modules/2.2.17 and copy files/directories from /lib/modules.old/2.2.17 which fixed the modprobe problem and gives me back my LAN. For newcomers:- Computer Gateway 5150 Notebool PII-233 64Mb RAM 4.3 GB HDD dual boot WinNT/Linux. I expanded the partition but failed to realise that LILO uses an absolute position for the boot sector and so it would not boot. At that point panic set in. I decided that I must have screwed up the kernel image and so did a base install from the 2.2r0 CD. With help from a number of people I have it so it boots and loads modules. On completion of the boot it presents a copy of the "Debian System Configuration" screens - the md5 password one! If I follow the prompts through 4 screens there is brief flash of text "loading /usr/share/keymaps/i386/qwerty/us/kmaps.gz" - as best I can read it. So how doI fix that? I can log in on tty2, only as root and without a password. I have 1230196 blocks used but dpkg only shows 79 of 296 packages installed. "startx" comes up with a message that libXmu.so.6 is missing and a "find" doesn't find it. All the X packages are there in /var/cache/apt/archives. Prior to my breaking it the system was running Ximian1.4 Gnome (just upgraded from Helix1.2) , ice-wm, with Netcape as my mail/news reader. If anyone know how to get apt/capt to recognise the existing packages it would be a great help. Well I guess I proved the old adage " a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing" :) Any suggestions on how to procede would be very welcome. TIA, Tim Wood