First, the hack to force the sound card on and to be unmuted does work. I put it into /etc/profile since that should apply to the whole system. I did manage to get dmesg output saved to a file. I'll see if I can get that copied to another place where it can be shared later. I failed to create a user account as root though I'm pretty sure I'll be able to do that with the installation disk in the drive running everything. What happened to cause the failure was that speakup died and I couldn't get it back to life just as the system said changing finger information. So I never managed to finish creating that user account. What is going on that should cause this, I do not know. When I tried mandb as root, speakup also died and I never got the root prompt back and typing the reboot command failed to speak as I typed it or to reboot the system. Failed to create secure file system message went away after I changed ro to rw in syslinux.cfg. Should /dev/sda3 have been mentioned in syslinux.cfg where I have /home? If so, I didn't do that and this may explain some of the difficulties. Finally, archlinux has to have enter hit once booted to start talking and I had adjusted timeout from 50 down to 20 earlier. The consolation prize for all of this is with each effected correction, the problems get different which since speakup still speaks sometimes and the system still boots probably points at some form of progress. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- jude <jdashiel@shellworld.net> Adobe fiend for failing to Flash