Mark Willey <mwilley@hillres142.cc.purdue.edu>  wrote:
 > The situation is that I have moved my root disk to a new drive with:
 > "cd /; tar cf - .??* [a-m]* [o-z]* | (cd nroot; tar xvpf -)"

I would never use 'tar' to create a new machine.  I don't know why, I
just have bad memories...

 > Now when I log in, I get permission denied reading my current directory.  I
 > believe the "getcwd" call fails with "EACCES" errorno.  It appears that
 > when I do an ABSOLUTE cd, (fully specifying /foo/bar/etc), then it begins
 > to work!

This is vaguely similar to something I once had a LONG time ago. Make
sure that you have proper permissions on the mountpoints before 
the system mounts filesystems over top of them.

ie: reboot to single-user and chmod the stub-directories properly, 
then bring the machine up. It'll probably work.