Just to check: am I right in thinking that to sort this error out all I have to do is boot off (the correct) CD in rescue mode(I'm a SUSE user atm) and then recompile the kernel properly, reboot and everything should work? I'd rather not doa full install unless absolutely necessary if that's possible?

What's the problem exactly? If job control isn't working are you sure you're using a shell like bash or csh that supports it?

Ok, so what I did was I misread some instructions and instead of typing make modules_install, I typed make modules install (as I had a bit of a brain fart). On rebooting I am confronted with a $ prompt which follows (at the bottom of all the setup dialogue) it says sh: can't access tty; job control turned off. Which admittedly is different from what I said in the title of the thread.

Having tried rescue system in order to get into /usr/src/linux and typoe make &&make modules_install, which is what I would think would be the solution (CMIIW) I could not find /usr/src.

Any thoughts on this now more complete error?

OK, I see what happened now. You have no modules for your running kernel. Did you leave your old kernel around? If so, just boot back into it and run make modules_install. If you try the rescue system you may need to mount the partitions of your old system and chroot into them. It's probably easier just to boot into your old kernel.

Ok. Where would my old kernel be? It was on the boot list until I ran SUSE's automatic repair program.

When I try rescue system I am confronted with a prompt that will let me log in as root with no password. Is this actually my machine? Also, where am I able to find out the information about this environment? From the fact that there is no src in /usr, I can only assume that the files I see when I type ls are not the ones that are on my machine; they are some sort of virtual machine. IS this correct or blind madness?

So, I'm going to try the following. Mounting /dev/hda1 on /mnt, using rpm -Va to find what modules I'm missing, extracting the relevant modules from the kernel rpm using rpm2cpio and putting them in the right place. Any thoughts?