HELP: Root login broken

[timothy@smasher.rs.itd.umich.edu]

Hi everyone, all of a sudden my root login seems  to have broken.
        When I su to root, it just stops and doesn't do anything. When I switch
to another VC and try to login as root, it gets as far as telling me I have no
mail, then it just stops.I have to press Ctrl+C to get out in both cases.
        Luckily when it started doing this I was logged in as root in one VC,
so I can still do stuff, but I have to figure out what is going on quickly and
fix it before I have a powerfailure or something, because when the machine 
comes back up, most likely I still wont beable to login root and no doubt I will
have to be root to fix whatever is wrong, so i'll be doomed.

        Any ideas on where I should start trying to fix this?
Thanks,
Timothy
PS: IF I su to root from the existin root login, it still dies trying to do it.
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E-Mail: timothy@smasher.rs.itd.umich.edu
Date: 19-Oct-98
Time: 19:42:57

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