I've run into a problem with Debian no longer booting on my laptop. At boot, when it trys to execute the boot up sequence in the rcS.d, it gives me errors that say "No such directory". The directory it's complaining about is /lib/lsb/init-functions and /lib/init. I'm then dropped to the command prompt. I do a cd /lib then cd lsb and sure enough it says lsb isn't a directory. Then I do a ls -al | grep lsb the first character says s instead of d. If I do a locate init-functions, it says init-functions is at /lib/lsb/init-functions, go figure.

Any ideas on how to fix or should I re-install?

If I need to reinstall, can someone provide a distro that allows you to install with full hard drive encryption easily. This is why I installed Debian as it was very simple unfortunately I'm not very keen on the rest of Debian.

It seems like you have messed up your file system. Do you remember what you have done before having this problem? It should some action you have done as root
I didn't understand what you mean with this: from which directory have you done these commands? And what is the exact output you get?

Did you try to give the command "startx"?

Matz.. he said he's doing `cd /lib` and then issuing the other commands. On my system:

I'm guessing something, somewhere (perhaps even the user) went wrong. Locate is reporting it as present in /lib/lsb because locate works (and is so fast) because of a cache it's keeping. Updating locate's database would make it 'see' that the file is gone. This is why I pref. `find` anyway, slower but more trust-worthy.

I'm a big fan of Debian, but that doesn't stop me from saying the following: I think the 10.3 openSUSE installer allows you to easily set up encrypted partitions. I'd try to find some more info though; see if what I've said is true *and* if this part of the installer is stable/mature/etc.

Good luck.

P.S.: can you think of anything (updates/tweaking/etc.) that took place a short period of time before you were no longer able to boot?

P.P.S.: what version of Debian are you using?

Thanks for the help. I bought some used RAM and put it in my laptop and restarted. Probably should've ran a memtest first but I didn't. When I restarted, I got a kernel panic. I then ran memtest and it gave me bad blocks. I pulled the bad memory and restarted and now I'm getting what's described in my original post.

After it gives me the Not a Directory errors, it kicks me down to a shell prompt. This is where I ran the commands in my original post as reverse described. I also ran fsck on the partitions thinking it'll clear the problem up but it didn't. I'm using Debian Etch.

I'm starting to think I'll be doing a reinstall. I did like Debian's installer for complete hard drive encryption. I'll look around and see if there's another distro that has the same capabilities.