[H-GEN] I can't login - HELP!

[Murray Spork]

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Eeek.

We had a power failure this afternoon and it fried my Linux box.

My /etc/passwd and /etc/group files went missing. I booted up in linux single
mode. There was a file passwd.bak and group.bak that looked ok so I did --

cp passwd.bak passwd
cp group.bak group

When I continued the reboot with <ctrl-d> I get to the login prompt without any
more errors -- but it won't accept my password.

So I went back into single mode and changed the passwd using /usr/bin/passwd

Didn't help. Still wont accept the new password.

I checked /var/log/messages and this is what I found

plato PAM_pwdb[556]: get passwd; pwdb: structure is no longer valid
plato login[556]: FAILED LOGIN 1 FROM (null) FOR root. Authentication service
cannot retrieve authentication info.

I then tried deleting the passwd field for the root account from /etc/passwd.
This didn't help either.

Also -- all  the passwd fields in /etc/passwd.bak appear to be a single  "x" --
which is weird isn't it?

Can anyone help?

I am using Mandrake 6.0
kernel is 2.2.9-19mdk

Thanks,

Murray Spork






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