Hi there,

Thr system doesn't recognize my username and passwords. When I start the computer, linux boots perfectly. It then asks for a username and password, which I type in the right order. But it then says "wrong username or password". This is not a caps lock problem. The problem came after mounting a new filesystem while fedora was running. I forgot to unmount it and restarted linux. While the system was shutting down it gave the message that it couldn't automatically umnount the file system I just mounted, and that I had to di it manually. But it was not possible to type any commands, so I push'd the restart button. I have my root (/) and /usr on two different partitions, which was working perfectly until I mounted another file system. now there is a /usr at the same patition as / and I thin that is the problem.
I booted the system with a knoppix live cd to see the partitions, but i can't make any changes to the files on the harddrive, because i don't have permissions to do so.
But how do I reset passwords or get the system back to normal again??

Boot with a rescue disk or with Knoppix and do "fsck -f /dev/xxxx" (whatever your partition is) to check the filesystem for problems. You can "su" to become root in Knoppix to get permissions to do anything.

Also, can you log in as root on your system?

Hi Spoon,
I can't even login with root.
I did -fsck -f /mnt/hda6, it check'd the file system and reported that 3.3% of the data doesn't point to each other.(it was in german so this is a very poor translation ;-). I still can't login.

shFourier: Boot into single user mode and use the passwd command to reset the root, etc. passwords.

You can get into single user mode (runlevel 1 /init 1) by editing the grub boot commands from the startup grub menu (i.e., “press any key...”). Select the grub menu line you normally boot with, edit it (see the commands below the menu) and then edit the “kernel...” line on the next screen. To the end of the kernel line, add “ init 1", without the quotation marks (i.e., ...quiet init 1). Then save the commands and boot. You will boot to command line and can run passwd, other utilities (e.g., e2fsck /dev/...) or attempt to start X (i.e., startx).

Once you are looking at the grub menu, these steps will be a lot clearer.

Hi WhatsHisName,

I did the grub thing and it work'd perfectly. Thanx a'lot for your help. The only thing is that it only recognizes the root user. But that is not a problem at all.

shFourier: Glad it worked out.

The “single-user grub backdoor” used to bother me from a security standpoint, but the proliferation of Live-CD linux distros makes looking inside almost any system trivial.

But with the availability of linux-based win_nt/2k/xp password resetting utilities (http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd) , windows is certainly not physically secure, either.

I discovered something strange. When I look in my directories, some of the items inside have a red background and a flashing white text... ie. in /dev the items MAKEDEV, XOR, cdrom, cdrom1, cdwriter, core, fd, floppy and many more are flaching... in /usr there is a folder tmp which is doing the same. Inside temp I have 2 other folders kdecache-root and the same for my normal user. They seem to be normal. What caused the flashing, and what does it mean?