yesterday i screwed up. i somehow turned the /etc/lib/kernel-2.4... folder that contains the modules config file into an undetermined file type. so now instead of mandrake finding the necessary files to boot appropriately, it doesn't... i need to re-define the kernel-2.4... file as a folder - please tell me someone knows how to do this.
the file responds appropriately to the chmod and chown commands, as i can boot off the install disk to a working console, but i don't know the command to re-define a file as a directory.
how screwed am i?

Mandrake 9.0
2.4.19-16mdk

i'm posting this using an old redhat installation on a spare 2G drive - always keep an extra everything!

How exactly did you screw it up? What is the output of 'ls -ld dir_name'?

correction:
the bad folder is /lib/modules/2.4.19-16mdk

the last program run was fsck

the last good boot asked me to "press 'y' within 5 seconds to check disk integrity" which i did, and it found inconsistencies on /dev/hda5 (mounted as /) which it corrected, but said that i should run fsck manually, ie. without the -p or -n tags (tags may have been differet, this is from memory as i cannot now re-create it)

ran fsck and it declared no errors, rebooted to see if it would prompt for disk integrity check again, and several (8 or 9) errors about "cannot open /lib/modules/2.4.19-16mdk/file_name: not a directory" appeared, X wouldn't start, and several commands (incl. vi) invoked a "kernel does not support that command" errors. rebooted again to watch more carefully and i think the /lib/modules/2.4.19-16mdk/ folder is what the boot looks to for several kernel-related startup procedures.

booted off of install cd to a console, and got this from an ls -ld 2.4.19-16mdk command from within /lib/modules:
?--------- 512 512 512 1409290240 Jan 24 1971 2.4.19-16mdk

used chown and chmod successfully to make the ls output:
?rwxr-xr-x 512 root root 1409290240 Jan 24 1971 2.4.19-16mdk

searched man for re-defining a file type as a directory w/ no joy.

I don't think you can redefine a file type just like that. And the chmod command won't help much since it seems to be an invalid entry. The date is all screwed up unless you are living a few years back. And the size of the file is supposed to be 1.3gig. Now either it's a dump of all the blocks used in the directory into one file (I doubt you have that many modules), or it's just an invalid entry. I think you'd be better off reinstalling then trying to restore from there. Have you rebuilt your kernel yourself? Otherwise you should be able to reinstall the kernel modules from the original cd. I assume they would put them in an rpm.

i installed another copy of mdk9 on a second hard drive, then copied the appropriate files from the new install over the corrupted ones, and yes, i did reinstall the kernel off of the RPM on the install cd.
it works again!
thanks for your ideas Mik!