I've been at this about a year and a half... enough to be dangerous. Well, since I overwrote insmod with a symlink, the computer is totally cut off from everything except itself. It won't recognize a network card and I can't mount a floppy, cd or thumb drive to copy the file back into the system. It seems like there might be a command line, more than mount -t vfat /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy ((failed to exec /sbin/modprobe -s -k vfat, errno = 2) /sbin/modprobe is a symlink to /sbin/insmod) that would "override" the need for insmod to have loaded the modules in order to recognize the type and mount something... is there?

TIA for any help on this,
tryangle

don't quote me on this, but I think you need to re-install modutils. since you can't access cd drive when the system is up and running, you will have to boot from cd, and run the system from the kernel image on cd.

then, create a mount point in /mnt to mount the partition in which your distro is installed. edit the running version of /etc/fstab to add the device and mount point so that you can mount the partition.

cd to /mnt/<mountpoint>

copy the modutils rpm from install cd to someplace in /mnt/<mountpoint> and install. just remember that the install location will be /mnt/<mountpoint>/sbin in order to install it to the partition and not the running version from cd.