"Testing" Installation Headache

[Peter Hillier-Brook <phb@hbsys.plus.com>]

I've just installed Testing on an old 800MHz Pentium III. The 
installation seemed to go fine until the final 2 steps: I wasn't clear 
why a shell was invoked and then, having exited the shell the only 
option left was to abort the installation.

Booting the new installation went well until the request for a user and 
password (in the GUI - Gnome I assume). Either the user, or the password 
was not recognised both for root and the default user I had created 
during the install.

My question is; is there any recovery option other than a re-install? I 
have several live CDs and Knoppix comes up fine, although grml doesn't.

Thanks for any advice.

Peter HB