Hi,

I had been running Linux for a while when a power outage fried my motherboard. My friend decided I needed to buy a new one. Somehow that led to me needing a new processor as well. After installing the new hardware my friend booted up the computer and everything was normal for a while. Then the computer froze. he re-started it, did something weird, and now, before my computer gets to the desktop environment, it goes to black screen and asks for my login and password. It doesn't recognize my login and password saying "check pass; user unknown" "authentication failure" etc.

Then every so often it says INIT: Id "x" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes

I had been running Redhat/KDE Fedora Core Release 3 Kernel 2.6.10-1.741_FC3

I know, that's probably pretty old now.

Anyway, it would be nice to know if there's anything I can do, or if my 'friend' has totally screwed up my computer by not knowing what he was doing and I've lost everything.

Thank you so so so much. It's been so long since this happened and I've had no home computer. I can't figure out what to do.

Jayray

I can't say I'm an expert, but from my knowledge, when you replace the motherboard, you kinda have to reinstall the OS. Actually I'm surprised it even worked for a while...
What he did, I don't know, but, in order to prevent brute force attacks, linux slows down the passwrod checking after a while. Anyway, the only thing you can do is reset the root password, see if it - accidently - works, and if it doesnt... just format and reinstall everything.