it's 1823p and i set a breakpoint on the call that's reporting the dir to not exist it appears to be correctly calling stat, not statx the path is /home/user/.bitcoin . it' s a sylink to a folder on this raid. 1825 the stat function is defined in /usr/include/sys/stat.h . it's an inline that was pleasantly not inlined. it calls out to __xstat and is being passed the right folder. 1826 stat returns 0, success. the structure thgat is output has modes and uids and inodes and sizes and all that. 1826 1827 ten it gets the mode on line 3253. it's 16877 . i am not witnessing the function return "directory" instead of "not found". guess this breakpoint is not on the issue. 1827 guess i'd better keep continuing until the problem is hit. 1828 okay. it says the subfolder .bitcoin/blocks is not found. is this true? yes. this folder is missing. 1829 errno is 2 now: no such file or directory i tried typing mkdir /home/user/.bitcoin/blocks on the command line, and it fails with 'file exists'. 1831 1832 okay when i typed ls to look for the 'blocks' folder, i was looking at output for the wrong directory. this issue has a resolution: my blocks folder is a broken symlink. whew. 1834 bitcoin is running for the first time in quite some time. my block database is empty on this system, unsure why. i can rebuild things in release mode.