Ah, thanks, Jon. It's wonderful to know it's still appreciated!

Regarding the disk integrity thing: If, at any time, you pulled the power mid-synch or mid-rebuild, or the synch crashed, and you didn't do another fsck afterward, then that's the reason it's happening. You'll simply need to do another fsck.

You said that you did the fsck once at the top of this thread, but then some other things happened and you didn't say whether you did another fsck after those other things happened and after you fixed the serial port assignment. I'll bet that's all it is.