Claude Jones wrote: | Just to update. Ran Spinrite on the drive last night, and it | found no problems. So this appears to be a corruption of FC5. | Probing for cause now. | I have found a solution with the help of some off-list advice. I post it for the sake of others this may happen to. I received the following suggestion off-list: "Hi Claude: Since I don't know how to post a message to the fedora list in response to your posting, here a private response. I had the same problem the last two days, also since using yum to update FC5. For me libpam.so was missing. Yesterday I put in the FC5 disk, started in rescue mode and was able to copy the missing library over from the disk's /lib to the /mnt/system(?)/lib of my hard drive. The libpam.so.0 file was a symbolic link in /lib to /lib/libpam.so.0.81.0 (I don't remember the number),. There is also a symbolic link from /usr/lib to /lib/libpam.so.0. That link existed still, but the computer noticed that the target file was missing. I don't remember the details (my computer is also at home while I'm at work), but if you compare the /lib and the /mnt/sytem(?)/lib directories, you might figure out what file is missing. Luckily the libpam.so version hadn't changed yet. I think today some upgrade also installed a new libpam version. In that case I'd might still be stuck. I'm no computer expert, and I don't know at all what happened. I just know that I copied that libpam file over and my computer is running again. Good luck! --- Johannes Bauer" I couldn't figure out how to copy the file from the DVD disk to my filesystem. I decided to try a yum update in rescue mode, just to see what got pulled in. There was a lot of stuff that supposedly was being updated when my system updated the other evening, so I guess I still have problems. I cancelled the update before execution, but, I did notice that pam was one of the updates. I tried a "yum install pam" without running any of the other updates. That installed successfully, and on reboot, my machine came up, without any of the errors I described in my original post. I don't exactly understand what happened during the original update, but it would appear that the process was interrupted/corrupted in some way, and didn't properly finish. I imagine there's some cleanup to be done, but I have the machine back, now. Thanks to Johannes Bauer for suggesting this avenue of investigation! Claude Jones Levit & James, Inc./WTVS Leesburg, VA, USA