Ok i've been searching around for a bit but G4L docs are pretty limited and I'm so damn pissed I'm probably (and hopefully) missing a detail thats holding me back.

Problem:
-FC5's welcome login screen appears after normal booting.
-Login Name and Password are correct, verified by SSH'ing from my win32 box using PuTTy
-After entering password and pressing enter on the FC5 box, screen goes black for a second as if logging in and loading gnome, but then returns to the login screen and there is no HDD activity.

Things I did, then it stopped working:
-Created G4L CD, mounted in FC5, copied cleandrive to /root, ran sh script, it finished successfully
-Booted from G4L .2x CD created from g4l.sourceforge.net ISO image
-Created compressed image accross FTP (40GB compressed to 1.7!!!!!)
-Rebooted and removed G4L Bootable CD

Things I CAN do:

-The only possible way to gain access to a session is with SSH or a LiveBoot CD (I used Knoppix + thumb drive to backup my data asap)

I can only think of a couple possibilties. I either stressed my shitty(and Old) Maxtor drive and now its misbehaving, or I inadvertantly messed something up with X-Server or Gnome during my cleandrive process.

Has anyone had this problem before? or experienced G4L problems? Any Help or Ideas would be great!


-Paul

ok ok...i figured it out.

upon further investigation and a quick eye, i found this dialog appearing before going back to original login.
"GDM could not write to the authorization file..."

not knowing what this was i referenced this
http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/sho...oto=nextnewest
and this
http://gnomesupport.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=11413

so now i was thinking ok...gnome writes session/user info to disk during logon. and it hit me! i used g4l's cleandrive which takes unused space and writes 0bits (reducing overall image size, because compressed 0's are smaller then garbage data)and it writes this to a file. sure enough that file was remaining in my trash bin.... I emptied the trash (a 30gb file) and i can now logon and resume normal operations!

HAZA!


I'm not sure if this fits in Fedora sub forums it could probably apply to all distros


-cheers
Paul