i was trying to get ruby to work right and it said it needed a newer version of glibc, so i went out and got the latest version of glibc. after compiling it, i did a make install(following the directions in the INSTALL file). the install took a while and then crashed towards the end. at this point, pretty much everything on my system stopped working correctly: every command i entered came back with a glibc error. i couldn't even shut it down properly. now the same thing happens when i boot, it cant initialize because things are so screwed up. is there any way i can recover from this?

i'm gonna try this: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=543647

What distro are you using?

slackware. that guide didn't help. i reinstalled the glibc packages from the install disk and verified it, but it crashed again when i tried to boot.

Did you verify that the glibc was actually restored from the CD correctly (i.e. it overwrote everything the new glibc did). To be honest, though, I'm not surprised -- messing with glibc is a good way to totally break your system (since most all of the system binaries are dependent on having a particular glibc installed). Honestly, it may be less of a pain to boot off of a LiveCD, backup your data, and reinstall.