I think I have a dying hard disk; the only other option is some virus. I was upgrading libc & gcc compliers (from potato) on my laptop over a PLIP connection when I gradually started losing priviledges to ftp and telnet into the machine. Once I logged out I couldn't log back in, even as root. At the login prompt I get something like "Incorrect password for 'UNKNOWN' on tty1." I can't even reboot, since ctrl-alt-del just retorts maliciously: "You don't exist. Go away."
So far I haven't even been able to get rescue/root floppies to work: ("Unable to open console.") but that may just be due to the corrupt disks I'm trying to salvage. I get no other symptoms of a dying disk: the boot sequence seems to go smoothly with no apparent corruption of the filesystem. ???? --David