well, I figured it would happen, just not like this. something got screwy in my instalation and now just about nothing works.

In my never ending quest to get my tweaky wlan card working I went to upgrade my driver version (from pre16 to pre20), so my obvious first step was to uninstall the old ones (I had used checkinstall).

then I figured I would reboot so that I could insert the new drivers after the install. well after I did the uninstall and rebooted, i got some weird error messages on boot it kept saying something about IDE, then at the end of each error it would say "... Fsck?".

Plus the permisions of /var are really messed up, nothing that needs /var works (like say X11)

so I guess i got no choice but to reinstall, suppose /var wasnt messed up, does what I describe sound like something familiar? sorry I couldnt post exact error messages but most my modules no longer work, so my modem doesnt either.

Sounds like your filesystem has been corrupted try running on fsck on it

how do i fsck it? its reiserfs if that matters.

cause I ran 'fsck.reiserfs /dev/hda3' and nothing hapened.

does it need to be unmounted?

try reiserfsck /dev/hda3

well, I ran reiserfsck and it said / cant be mounted when I do it.

so I poped in LNX-BBC and ran it, and it fixed a number of things including deleting a x11 log in my var directory that it said 'points to nowhere', so I think that was my problem that I thought was /var permisions.

then it said there was one error that couldnt be fixed w/o running it with the --rebuild-tree flag, so despite the danger i went ahead and did it, now EVERYTHING works. YAY, problem solved. thanks 4 the help.