Centos-and-Speakup?

[Hart Larry]

Thanks Bill, actually I will probably have at least 3days of sighted help from 
a Broadcast engineer who loves Linux.  I will save and share replies with those 
outside of this community who will be helping me.
As some background, what helped intensify my upgrade, has been what happened to 
my PC since Election Day.  I began seeing journal errors on my /mnt/f drive, so 
I tried unmounting.  For some reason I umnounted alot--and-file systems became 
read only.  I could not even successfully edit fstab with nano.  Other than 
just a hookup to my shell account, I cannot do much with the machine.  When I 
go in bash and hit escape 4times, it says I have 530 programs.  Mostly 
everything, including "who" says command not found.  It will not let me mount 
anything--and-if I go to a console not logged in, and try, just hangs.  Some at 
the LUG meeting say I should pull the plug-and-not use the machine, as they 
think I am in a lo level recovery mode.  Thanks in advance
O, this all began with a memory stick going bad-and-crashing the machine
Hart