Creation of a separate /boot partition helped. I did it with syslinux, and have partition structure of /dev/sda1 /boot 50MB /dev/sda2 swap 1024MB /dev/sda3 /mnt 15440MB and /dev/sda4 /home remainder of the disk. Since in this configuration, /dev/sda3 correctly points to /root I left it alone but edited syslinux.cfg to point at linux-lts and also changed ro to rw at the end of those append lines. I did that after booting the machine and waiting an hour then hitting enter to get anything going. I heard archlinux start talking but also heard message failed to create secure directory again. So the rw on those append lines has if only temporarily enabled this system and disk writes to work. I don't have authority to edit the beginner's guide, and do have to question if anyone really did follow those instructions to the letter and come out of it with a working system. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- jude <jdashiel@shellworld.net> Adobe fiend for failing to Flash