Guys, Please bear with me and share your experiences with me if you would. I have looked everywhere for hints regarding this problem. It all started when I saw many entries like this in /var/log/messages: "smartd[2527]: Device: /dev/sda, 4 currently unreadable Then I booted with knoppix so I could run fsck on all partitions including the root partition /dev/sda1. I got a suitable superblock number (SBN) mke2fs -n /dev/sda1 and ran fsck.ext3 -fvy -b <SBN> -B 4096 /dev/sda1 fcsk performed many corrections in countless inodes but not bad blocks were reported. I know this is already bad. And I'm in denial. The next thing that happened I could not login into my system. I set the system to boot at runlevel 3. The split second message after a failed login attempt was Login: no shell: permission denied When the system boots it gets me to the GRUB splash window, and from there I can go to single user mode (SUMode). Once I got to the CLine I checked all file and home dirs permissions. Made sure that files such as /etc/shells and /bin/bash were ok. Check permissions on /home and "/" itself. Things seem to be in place; so I decided to create a new account called "test". Booting and trying to login with the test account also failed. I went back to SUMode and ran strace to check the "test" account: strace -o /tmp/xout.strace -f su test Well, I got a ton of messages like this one: access("/etc/ld.so.preload", R_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) I got the same message for many files including /usr/X11R/bin/xauth, /var/run/utmpx, /usr/share/local/en/tcsh, etc. Now, in SUMode I can login to the test account with "su test" and pwd shows /home/test. I can do "su -" and do mount, umount, fsck and such on the other filesystems. So here are my questions: Is one not to perform fsck on the "/" filesystem to avoid the mess Iran into? Is giving the -y option to fsck a bad thing? Did fsck remapped blocks of data in a way that wiped important files in my system? How is it the just enough damage is done so one can only done in SUMode? I read somewhere that you can replace bad sectors with dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda1 bs=4k will this bring the disk to a usable state so I can reinstall the OS? I also ran "smartctl -d ata -t long /dev/sda", but see nothing displayed to give me a clue of the results of the test. How do I check this? I now the easy way out is to "replace the hard drive",but I been trained in the "Admin Ways". I'd like to understand what's going on. Thanks in advance. ~Aldo.