For no reason when I booted up linux it complained about not finding a root system, so I used a boot disk and fscked it and it found some errors and fixed it. So I tried to boot it and this time it has a kernel panic no init found try passing etc... Thats strange, so I poked around and found out that everything under bin and sbin has an asterik in front of it! I think it may have been something to do with fsck but I"m not sure. Does anyone have any experience with this issue? Thanks a lot in advance

I apologize I made a mistake, I don't think the problems have anything to do with the asteriks, I think it's just the naming convention of my boot disk or something. Still I don't know whats wrong with my system, grub.conf is fine and all the files seem to be in the right place. Any suggestions?

Oh and I have a gentoo system with grub.conf as follows (note: this was working fine before and the questions marks stand for some version number that I don't remember excactly)
root (hd0,0)
kernel=(hd0,0)/boot/kernel-? root=/dev/hda6
initrd=(hd0,0)/boot/initrd-?

Were the asterisks _in front_ of everything, or after, i.e. /bin/*cp or /bin/cp*. The former would be _very_ odd, the latter is just decoration that ls can add if asked. The * after the file means that the file is executable.

If the latter, what does

file /sbin/init

tell you?

thanks for the reply, thats the strange thing, there is no init and there wasn't any bash but all my other files and programs are still there. I copied over the init and bash from my livecd and now it boots but it complains about a whole bunch of things missing. I think during the fsck process it did something called rebuildtree and I think that might have wiped some of my stuff. I user reseirfs by the way. It seems that all my init scripts are there and intact too. This is very strange.