Re: HELP! can't become root

[tom arnall <kloro2006@gmail.com>]

On Wednesday 03 October 2007 12:38, Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 03, 2007 at 12:12:52PM -0700, tom arnall wrote:
> > I got impatient with an aumix error and did 'chmod -R /dev' (and ctl-C'ed
> > out of it after ~3 min's.) now I can't become root. Some examples:
>
> wow, that's ugly. And since it went for ~3mins that's a lot of
> chown'ed files. I agree with others, just easier to reinstall or
> restore from backup. If you want to fix it as an exercise, try booting
> into /bin/bash (add init=/bin/bash to your kernel boot line), and see
> what you can fix. It may be possible, I suppose, that you could fix up
> the perms/ownership on the right handful of things to allow you to
> become root and then you could  chroot into the system and essentially
> reinstall everything through apt.
>
> good luck
>
> A

i've been running the system for the last couple of days. the only visible 
problems are:

	the font stinks for firefox.
	
	i can't become root, not even in single-user mode, but i can 'sudo' all i 
want.
	
is it possible i could fix the two problems without having to reinstall?

thanks,

tom