Re: yikes! locked out of own system!
On 28-Mar-2002 nick phillips wrote:
> hello again list,
>
> so i'm not sure how it happened but i've managed to lock myself out of my
> system. i had installed debian 2.2.19 and installed enlightenment as the
> deskop manager and everything was going ok. i tried installing a program
> called jmax, and through a bunch of dependency problems ending up giving up
> -- it requested libc6.2.4, which in turn requested locales 2.4, etc. etc. so
> eventually i thought better of trying out all these unstable packages. so i
> uninstalled them, then when i logged out of enlightenmnet, i know login to a
> a graphical login screen that says "X Window System" -- before I'm pretty
> sure the same login screen said "Debian user" or something like that. When I
> try any of my passwords, they now don't work! I'm not sure what the problem
> could do, and I have no way of getting past this screen to fix it! Has
> something gone wrong with X Server or with XF86Setup? Does anyone have any
> suggestions?
>
1) take a deep breath, it will be ok.
2) press ctrl-alt-F1, this should return you to a console.
3) try to log in as a user if that fails try root
4) still doesn't work? No problem. Reboot the machine. When you get the
lilo: prompt hit ctrl. Type 'linux single' and hit enter. Try to log in.
5) still no luck? wow, not happy (-: That's ok. We have one more trick.
Reboot again. At the lilo prompt do 'linux init=/bin/sh'. This will drop you
into a shell as UID 0. Should be able to fix most anything now. Note if it
comes to this, you will have to mount your disk(s) by hand. None of the usual
init scripts will have been run.
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