HELP!!!!!

[Bill vance]

Ok, to answer a few questions first.  The only things that look normal
in /etc/fstab
are the cdrom and floppy drive entries at the bottom.  Only two of the
hard drive partitions have entries, and they look like:

  #  /  was on /dev/sda7 during installation
  UUID=09983a2b978e8843-3e24-432a-96ca-2b9788e8b86e  /  reiserfs relatime  0  1

Mtab has only two entries for those partitions as well, but they look
more like they
belong in fstab. I.e.:

  /dev/sda7  /  reiserfs  rw,relatime  0  0

Anyway. all suggestions up to now have been pretty usless, because _NOTHING_
is writing to _ANYTHING_, period.  Not me, not nano, not aptitude/apt-get,
_NOTHING_.

Something tells me that something that whats needed writes directly to
the harddrive partions, not the system files, but what that might be I
have no idea,
nor what else to do after that.

Bill