Hi Joe, Hmmm: Post your /proc/mounts and your /etc/ftab please? 1) Your / partition shows "errors=remount-ro 0 1 dmesg|grep read-only If you see a line in dmesg that reads "Remounting filesystem read-only" (/ as 'ro') then obviously it is mounting read only and I would suggest you force a fsck, but only by booting into the LiveCD say for Knoppix where the /dev/sda1 is not used for anything. Once it's no longer mounted read only, you can force a fsck. You can also try to unmount and remount. fsck -y /dev/sda1 OR without rebooting in to a diagnostic distro or LiveCD try: umount /dev/sda1 mount /dev/sda1 / THEN Try to FORCE a fsck: touch /forcefsck reboot 2) What does your /etc/passwd and /etc/group file say for your users? Are those numbers the same on your root partition? You might need to do a quick chown to your ~/ or $HOME directory to get the right UID/GID for it. grep root /etc/passwd grep $username /etc/group chown -R root:root /home cd /home chown -R $username:$username username That should clear up and uid/gid issues. 3) It's possible that you are trying to use the UUID to mount that /home partition and that's failing. Use the /dev/sda6 instead in your fstab. COPY existing FSTAB to backup first: Remove that UUID line and change to the /device name. While the UUID is the standard, you can also use the old conventions like so: /dev/sda1 / ext4 rw,errors=remount-ro 0 0 with /dev/sda6 /home ext4 rw 0 0