On 01/02/02 Brendan J Simon did speaketh:
> Please help. I can't logon to my system as root. I'm running testing
> on a AMD Athlon 1600XP machine with 256MB RAM and 40GB hard disk.
>
> I used to be able to login but I upgraded some packanges and now I can
> not login as root on the console nor via gdm. I can login as a normal
> user but when I try to "su" I get a segfault. The password is
> definately correct as I get different responses for wrong passwords.
> When the password is correct I see the welcome to Debian 3.0 message
> but then it throws me straight out.
>
> Please help as I can not do any more apt-get upgrades or other sys admin
> maintenance. Please reply to me with "reply all" as well as the list.
Sounds like something along the lines is corrupt, maybe the passwd file.
You can try rebooting, and at the lilo prompt add the option init=/bin/bash.
Then remount your root filesystem after you get a prompt, read-write, and
clear the root password from /etc/passwd or /etc/shadow (depending on whether
you're using shadow passwords). That should permit you to login as root with
no password. Reboot and run passwd to set the root password again.
The remount will be something like
mount -o remount,rw /dev/hda4 /
Mike
--
Michael P. Soulier <msoulier@mcss.mcmaster.ca>, GnuPG pub key: 5BC8BE08
"...the word HACK is used as a verb to indicate a massive amount
of nerd-like effort." -Harley Hahn, A Student's Guide to Unix
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