thanks for the reply! sorry about sparse-ness, at work but really cant wait to get back to it...
can sudo startx if i boot into text, but have to have attempted to startx as tc or i get a green screen! just startx as tc returns the initial error, suid must be root (or similar, apologies again)
hda1 only has boot and tce dirs... how can i get the os filesystem to live here?
If by this you mean /etc, /usr and so on, this is meant to exist in ram in tinycore...
yep, meant this... so, what about persistent changes to fstab & modprobe.conf for example?
would i be right in saying that i make any changes to my .[config files] in my home, copy to hda1/home and set the boot option all will be good?