On Tuesday 23 November 2004 05:40 pm, James Mckenzie wrote: > .Hi, > > >I have a bit of a problem. > >Something went wrong with my laptop. Sudden I could not login anymore. KDM > >kept reporting dat it had some kind of error (A critical error occurred. > >Please look at KDM's logfile(s) for more information or contact your > > system administrator.) and I could not login anymore. However, when I try > > to login over for instance ssh, I cannot either. So I think it is > > probably not a problem with KDM, but with the login. I cannot login under > > my normal user or under the root. > > Sounds like your /etc/passwd or /etc/shadow files could be corrupt. Also, > the /etc/group file could be damaged which will deny you access to the > system although you could login. What exactly is the error message that > you are receiving? This is not easy to recover from if you did not make > backup copies of these files. I suggest booting with the rescue cd disk > (you did make one, right?) and trying to fix the files. > > >Do you have any idea how to get in and what steps to check what exactly > > went wrong and how to fix it? > >I think something went wrong with some files on my system, since I had > > some problems with the disk also, however when I check the disk now, it's > > clean. It could be that login files were damaged or something. > > Definately looks like the login files are damaged. > > >It also tried using Knoppix to get on the system, which works and I can > > read the kdm.log file under /var/log, but I cannot find any useful > > information there, except for some keyboard error, but that is probably > > not it. > > You can get in with Knoppix which is a good thing. However, you need to > fix the passwd and shadow files. I do not know how to do this but I do > know enough to have a backup of them. > > > James McKenzie > A Proud User of Linux! I am not recieving much, except for the error above in KDM. When I go to runlevel 3 and try to login then it does not accept my login. It does not even ask for my password. I have a backup of yesterday of the /etc, however the shadow file is not in it. Does anyone know why? It's a standard tar czf of the entire directory. - Jeroen
