I have been running Fedora (4 I beleive) for a year or so now, and have never had any problems, I use the computer as just an http and ftp server.
Today when I tried to reboot my computer it starts up, and just after the "press I for interactive startup" message it tries to load UDEV, and it says "No such user: root". Then during the rest of the boot process MANY things fail because it can't find the "user" it makes references to root, sshd, nobody, and some others. Basically it appears to me that it can't find the information pertaining to users.
It then goes to a screen saying that GDM is missing, and to fix the problem and reboot, and the only option is to click "ok" which brings the same screen up in an endless loop.
I don't have a clue why this would happen, and I most certainly have not made any changes to the system in the past 6 months or so.
Any help would be great, I know VERY little about unix/linux so any assistance in great detail would be much apprecaited.

Just reread the title and saw "suck" instead of "such" .. oops...

It looks to me like you have a failing disk drive. I imagine that the boot sequence could not find the /etc/passwd file, hence the inability to find various user accounts. I believe that the remedy is to replace the hard drive. If you don't have backups or if you don't know how to restore from backups the you will probably have to reinstall Linux.

This could be a good opportunity for you to look into the various distributions available. There are lots of live CDs that you can test run. There are a lot of resources for finding live CDs. I like to use distrowatch.com but there are other lists. Red Hat 4 is pretty old. The newer distributions will have new features that you may enjoy using.

You could edit it to make it less rude. It doesn't make any sense to leave it as it is.

And better to not double-post, it won't help and in general some people like me won't answer to double-post.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=519627

I tried to edit it, but it won't let me edit the subject, just the contents of the article. (at least that I could find)

So which area does it belong in? Is it a newbie question because I'm a newbie (to both the forum, and Linux) or the software section because it is a software related issue? If there was a "boot" section I'd have put it in there, but since that doesn't exist I figured I'd post it in both areas that seamed like it was applicable.
And it won't help? Well I posted in both areas and I ended up getting a good response from someone knowledgeable, in at least one of them, what if I had posted only in the other area? Maybe I wouldn't have gotten a response.
But since you've made it clear that your standards of not answsering double posting are of greater importance then sharing your knowledge I don't expect to be getting any advice from you, a pitty I'm sure.

And thanks to everyone that actually welcomes new people and shares thier knowledge!

It does not matter too much where you post (unless you really put it in the wrong one like sucurity). It's more an OS issue in my opinion, so newbie or general would have been OK.

Edit your post with the <edit> button, click <go advanced> and you can edit the title.