On Sat 24 Dec 2011 at 01:42:00 +0000, Sharon Kimble wrote: > Tonight at midnight my backup of my home directory failed, and on > investigation why it couldn't make a directory i found that i didn’t > have the right permissions. On further checking I found that the > ownership had reverted to root:root, so I rebooted. Please post the output of '/sbin/fdisk /dev/sdX' for the drive.