okay. I'll start by saying that this is a problem of my own making. I'm sure of that
I wiped Mandrake 10 from my system and replaced it with Debian --- all is fine excpet for my /home files. I have moved them around a lot ----- from hdb to hda but now they are secure on / ---- also they are copied to /oldhome. I want to remove all of /home and mount /dev/hda3 as /home and copy /oldhome to /home. I feel it is necessary to remove the contents of /home before I do this ----- but I can't. I'm told I only have read-only access to the files ---- this happens as user and as root. I can' t get rid of any of the files. It's very frustrating. I've tried {chown root /home/user} where user is the user account name of the files in question. I've tried {chown user /home/user} --- is this because I created my home in Mandrake 10??? Please advise before I go bonkers. Thanks

You should be able to do it as root - IF YOU ARE VERY SURE YOU WANT TO DO THIS!
rm -rf /home

If you get an error - can you post the exact output.

I realise that -rf is very frightening --- can I do rm -rf /home/whatever ??

Well --- I tried rm -rf /home/user but was told ----- "can't --- Read Only" or words to that effect.

Considering you didn't actually give any more information than we already got from your first post it's pretty difficult to tell what went wrong - just check your file permmissions and see if the partition is mounted in read write.

well -- at the moment, the partition is / and it is the default /home of a new install. i just copied the old /home files there from /hdb1. The problem is with my own user account --- everyone else (two other users!) has been removed. I'll check whether /home/user is mounted rw but there are other files there --- such as kde-user kde-userrSOdn6 ksocket-user ksocket-userabU464 mcop-user user --- where user = errr user I've never noticed these files in /home before.

look at your ls -laF and see what the responce is. if you only have r straight across then there is something fishy going on as once you chown root path and then chmod 777 or 755 or how ever you want to set it for root you should be set.

Esteeven,
It seens you have this file system mounted read only. As root, enter "mount". It will show you all the mounted partitions, In the end of the line, you will see (rw) or (ro). If it's ro neither root can do anything.
If it is this case, you must look "/etc/fstab" to see if you are ordering this, or there are any problem during the system start up, which remounts the partition as (ro).