Re: yikes! locked out of own system!
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On Thu, Mar 28, 2002 at 11:48:07AM -0500, 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?
Firstly, this sounds like a debian-user thing :)
Second, it sounds like a problem with your authentication system, rather
than with the X-server. Just to be sure, press Ctrl-Alt-F1 to switch to
a text prompt and try to login from there (both as root and as a user).
If that doesn't work, your PAM is most likely broken.
The easiest way I can think of to fix it, (OTTOMH,) is to do the
following:
* Reboot the system. At the LILO prompt, enter the name of the image
you wish to boot, followed by 'init=/bin/sh' This will bypass
authentication and boot you straight into a shell, running as root.
* remount the root filesystem read-write ('mount / -o remount,rw') so
that you can do what you need.
* What happens next depends on what's broken. Try running passwd and
resetting your root password. Reboot the machine normally. If you
still can't log in, then there's something wrong with your PAM
system. The quickest way to fix that is to re-do the upgrade you
interrupted. To do that, reboot with /bin/sh as above. You'll have
to mount /var (if applicable), and bring up the network interface
before you can upgrade.
HTH,
- --
Mike Alborn <malborn@odoitau.dyn.dhs.org>
# http://odoitau.dyn.dhs.org
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